[patrickyeon]

It's two blocks of steel, which have been milled, then turned, then one of them is laser-etched (and possibly painted), and they are finally both finished. Oh, and there's the screw-in part at the top. And it's being done in a relatively small run, which factories hate. The tooling cost is spread across 5.5K pens, not 5M or more. And Kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon something like that as well.

Then you have to ship to yourself. And then re-package and ship out to your customers. And be ready to deal with people complaining about them. And some will get lost in the mail (not your fault, but if you want to be awesome, you treat it as if it is). And you have to pay yourself. And the person un-boxing and re-boxing the pens. And you worked on it before there was a Kickstarter for it, so you should probably pay yourself for that time.

And maybe, maybe, you want some money left over so that you can afford to front the cash for your next run, instead of always counting on Kickstarter projects. It's not always easy.