Not saying that's bad, just that my question is what makes this cost what it does. If it weren't justified, there'd be competitors doing it way cheaper (the field is accessible and large enough for that), so it's just a question out of curiosity.
Add another 20 parts that you need to order from different place, make sure they meet the specifications, pay for shipping for a lot of different packages and that many things must be bought in bulk and not single pieces.
USD 200 is a bargain for this kit. Sure, you might be able to save a couple of dollars if you do the work yourself. But is that worth many hours of work, and the risk of ordering wrong stuff?
Like, pretty much every other product that wasn't an entirely new concept in the last few years? Looking around me, I think the thing with the highest R&D price component is probably the chips in computers (desktop, laptop, smartphones), everything else is just mass production and low markup with hardly any research recuperation in the price (keyboard, lamp, paper, desk, floor, beanbag, fridge, IR thermometer, picture frames, a spoon, a computer display...). Unless you meant "when is that not the case for astro trackers", I don't get what you meant because it's rather exceptional to still be paying off R&D if you're buying regular mass-produced consumer products.
> This is something that has been thought about,
Obviously, but if it's open source (with a free, commercial-use license and no big call for donations other than a coffee) then apparently recuperation that design time is not a goal, they're actively giving it away for free and encouraging people to make it themselves. That suggested to me that the price must be for an expensive component or two. Or perhaps the printing time, but since it's mostly unattended and filament is cheap, I didn't expect it to be that. And the tracking calculations have been long done by people decades ago, so it's just buying parts and putting them together, where the "putting together" part is done by the customer since it's a kit. So yeah I expected the price to be mostly an expensive precise motor or something.
R&D is everything in making of something. Just because someone else made it doesn't mean you get to start exactly where they left off (except in cases of open source where you get their literal plans). Even in wood working or any shop type of work, you often spend more time setting up things like jigs or other custom tooling than it takes to do the actual work. Is that supposed to be a sunk cost to the builder? No, it is part of how the builder arrives at the price of the final thing being built.
R&D cost is built in to everything you buy, otherwise the companies that make this stuff wouldn’t be profitable. The amount of per unit R&D markup for, say, a thermometer just isn’t as high due to its relatively low complexity and huge number of units sold. This thing is niche and not going to sell that many units.
