[thinkmassive]

Exactly! $5 Zero, $10 Zero W, still an excellent deal compared to alternatives. An ESP dev board or a Feather costs more, and those don’t run Linux.

People who complain about the cost making their projects difficult should speak up about the alternatives they’re jumping to instead.

[altmind]

esp32 boards(not a devboard, but rpi is not a devboard too) starts from $4.42 with free shipping on aliexpress. yet you are right - less ports, slower, less memory, no linux and a different microarchitecture.

[thinkmassive]

ESP32 without a devkit is just a surface mount chip. It would be more fair to compare that with the RPi’s SoC alone.