$500 drones are low end. High end drones can cost in excess of $1 million.
$1 mil? Try hundreds of millions of dollars!
Of course it depends on who manufactures them. Arms dealers in the West produce extremely expensive stuff. For example the Northrop Grumman's US military drone RQ-4C that Iran shot down with single $1k surface-to-air missile back in 2019 cost over $220 million.
Now the same family of drone (high-altitude remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft) like Shahed-147 manufactured by Iran or Shahed-149 (which is also a combat aerial vehicle) barely cost $200k per unit! That is a 1000x price difference.

Good examples, but those prices are probably a scam. You know the government doesn't care since it is not spending its own money, and they get different kind of kickbacks. The drone is probably really costs than $1M and that is being generous for the sake of the argument. Still the short term future is gonna be in methods and technologies for disrupting the drones.