Anything we say about price is just guessing lol I know a company that sells a box thats a raspberry pi inside to manage some hardware at my job and its 950$ so just because its a pi doesnt mean we can begin to guess at price as its really up to company how much they price it at as real hardware price doesnt always impact final product costs
But given the industry Id imagine they would try to keep it low and accessible
You know I was begin to wonder as to how we arrive at 20-40$ as no information is from the Bitfence team as at the time of typing this lol... It's still pure stipulations let see upon main launch how much it's going to do for
Their whitepaper confirms it's free to download:
'BitFence software will be available to download as freeware.'Source:
https://bitfence.io/data/BitFenceWP-EN-1.6b.pdf They will not be selling something they are giving away for $900, they also say that they are selling SD cards with it preloaded, this might be like $5 over what a standard one costs, but their goal is to get as many of these miners globally as possible, their money will come from selling the fingerprints as definitions to other companies, and as part of the subscriptions.
Yep its software they are developing so it makes sense that they cost things based on that always best that they deal with that.
And while yes bitffence software is free and available if they release a hardware version or preloaded version you should expect a bit of markup as production isnt free nor is shipping and handling and loading. But from what i read almost any moderately techie should be able to do it on their own