[M4v3R]

The bill of materials might not come close to that number, but materials are not the only cost when creating a hardware product. In your end price you need to factor in stuff like time spent on research, designing, testing, prototyping, writing & debugging software. Then there's manufacturing, packaging, storage, marketing and probably others. When you take all these into account plus the fact that this will not sell in millions of units, the price suddenly doesn't seem that high.

And from a consumer point of view - a very technical person could probably pull off something similar to this, but the amount of hours a project like this would take a single person is probably in the hundreds and you would not approach the quality of this unless you invested a lot of money into equipment (assuming you don't own high quality 3d printers and other things required to build this).

[petoi]

Our first robot Nybble cat was born as a maker project https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nybble-world-s-cutest-ope... with crowdfunding in 2018.

Bittle was also born from our crowdfunding project on Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle in 2020.

You can read about our history there.

In addition to the points you raised, one of the big challenges is to manage the supply chain and the bill of materials. For example, during covid, we faced the challenges of chip shortage.

For any hobbyist project, people don't really need to worry about things at scale.