When the Pegasos 2 G4 was introduced a decade ago, its introduction price for end-users was €499 EUR (~$680 USD in todays rate) including VAT (was it Luxembourg's 15% rate?). Genesi's price strategy was to set an initial high price and then lower it over time (a "skimming" price strategy).
Considering the cost of development and production, the pricing of the Pegasos mainboards was very aggressive and chosen to help grow the market more quickly. If the product had been positioned as a niche product with small growth potential instead, the price would have had to be considerably higher than it was.
Back then I do recall that I thought it was kind of expensive for a motherboard/CPU combo, especially by the value of the money back then, but it was a small volume product for a narrow market, so high prices are to be expected, right? And when I say "high prices", I mean compared to x86 (not to PPC Mac's).
Everything is relative. If you compare the cost of a passively cooled Pegasos mainboard / processor combination to a passively cooled x86 solution from back then, it was not expensive at all. Even today, "silent computing" afficionados are willing to pay quite a premium.
It was neither designed nor manufactured in China, it was all European. After a while the price came down a bit, in *at least* 2 price drops IIRC. And when the Pegasos 2 was finally discontinued, the remaining stock was sold out at $399 USD, brand new.
This was via direct sales to consumers á la DELL, however. There were retailers that were not too happy about the price drops because their profit margins were rather slim to begin with and some of them still had mainboards in stock that they had bought at prices that did not allow them to match Genesi's lower pricing.
As happens often with startup companies, the distribution strategy for the Pegasos changed frequently from a traditional retail-focused approach, to an elaborate affiliate program, and direct sales.
At one time, some people in the Amiga community begged Genesi/bPlan (who was then completely focused on development based on ARM CPU's) to make another PPC motherboard. They thought this would be a bad idea themselves since they didn't see any business incentives for it (it would be an "impossible" product), but they finally agreed to do it provided that the community would cover the development cost.
A former Genesi contractor had an idea for a new PowerPC mainboard and asked bplan for a price quote. After a careful review and discussions on websites such as MorphZone, he concluded that it was too risky to proceed. This was the starting point for the bounty project.
This would be realized through a six (?) step bounty scheme, that in the end would add up to $60,000 (IIRC, or was it EUR, can't remember, doesn't really matter anyway).
The cost would have been about 100.000 US dollars.
