Before I tell you kids to get off my lawn, there was a time when development kits were thousands of dollars, and only if you had a good business relationship with a chipmaker.
TI actually had BeagleBoard (not BeagleBone) and PandaBoard for OMAP long before RPI came along. Those were nice, but still were close to $200. Probably $300 in today's dollars.
Yeah for a while before RPi and Arduino embedded/DSP dev hardware was pricey. I still remember when I worked for ADI that their “EZ-Kit” SHARC and Blackfin development boards were insanely expensive, >$500 each or so. The real kicker was that the JTAG emulator you programmed it with with cost thousands of dollars. Never made sense to me, I always figured if people were putting in orders worth millions, why not just offer dev kits and software for some nominal fee.
Someone later produced a cheaper Blackfin dev board called the “STAMP” and sold it for ~$100ish and worked to support uCLinux and a GCC backend. Picked one of those up and did a bunch of hacking in my own time, really fun stuff.
And before JTAG you had in-circuit emulators which could cost tens of thousands of dollars. And even today we're spoiled by Seeger JLink. The Lauterbach tools used to be the only game in town for ARM besides ARM's own stuff and it was all crazy expensive. But it was pretty powerful too.
And back in those days if you were a high volume customer you got all the development tools for nothing. But that didn't help startups and tinkerers at all. Hacking hardware in the early days was not easy.
No, this is what parts cost, don't let Broadcom fool you with the RPi SoC.
This TI AM625 is around $18 in high quantity. When you add in all the connectors and DRAM and the PCB/assembly it sure looks like a $100 retail cost is almost selling it for no profit.