but rather I see it as the equivalent of a year`s stock of styrene
I know this is on a massive tangent... but I found a guy on eBay who's selling A3 & even A2 size sheets of styrene (.5mm, .75mm, 1, 2 & 3mm thick) in packs of 1-10 sheets, for about a quarter the price of Evergreen. What would've cost me close to $200 in Evergreen just cost me $40 (3x sheets of .5mm, 3x .75mm & 3x 1mm A3 size). Even his 6kg packs of two part resin (Smooth on brand) cost me just over half what my 'usual supplier' would've charged.
Anyway, back to the topic... I have no idea what the average wage is in the rest of the world so I'm not going to try and compare, but I know that here in Australia a lot of people are only earning around $550 per week, when you then put the conversion rate for the cost of this model into perspective (as Andrew said, it converts to around $436), that is a hell of a lot of money.
Having said that, I fully appreciate how much time and effort goes into these sort of things, even the 'behind the scenes' style purchases (a CNC milling machine starts at around $1200, a decent quality 3D printer starts at around $1800 (plus materials), and the CAD software to run it all, anywhere from $400 for a cheap basic 2D package through to $2000 for professional grade 3D quality rendering software (recently been looking into it all for my D11R dozer project).
All I was meaning previously, was that hypothetically, if you build a kit such as this, and when you add up the hours of labour, materials used etc it comes to $10,000, wouldn't it be better to sell 200 of them for $62.50 each (this includes a 25% "profit" per item) rather than 50 of them for $250 each (once again, including a 25% "profit" per item).
You're getting the same profit margin both way's, but with one of them you're making them incredibly difficult for people to buy (or even justify buying, hence this type of discussion thread) where as with the other you're making the item & your company far more appealing to a much wider market, which will inevitably be far more beneficial to your company in the long run.
To put this into perspective, I am just beginning work on a 1/25 D11R, for some of the parts (drive sprockets, road wheels, idler wheels, track links etc) I plan to make one 'master' then reproduce the rest accordingly. If I was to make casts of the entire thing and make a resin 'kit' of it, I would require a very significant return, so far before I have even put a knife to the first piece or plastic, it's cost me $600. I anticipate by the time its finished for that to at least triple, and that's not including the value of an hours labour (let's say this is worth $25 per hour and it takes 500 hours of work to build it).
If I was to try and make resin or multimedia kits of this, then straight away I
need to recoup losses of at least $1800 for parts/materials and as much as $12500 for time, If I sold 25 of them for $572 each, I still wouldn't make a single cent profit out of them.