Excellent write up! This answered some of my questions that I wasn't really comfortable asking creators. A very (and I mean very) long time ago when people were complaining about the price of software I wrote up a Usenet post on why software costs what it does and enlightened a number of people to the fact that yeah, there are many things you don't think about when you're just looking at the list price.

Presumably the contract doesn't allow you to sell product directly if you wanted too. The other thing I'm curious about is that CrowdSupply does continue to list "buying options" long after the creator has gone away. Which makes me wonder if they have some sort of rights to tooling etc post campaign?

This was a really interesting read! Back in the day a friend and I started a company and Kickstartered a RPi add-on. The kickstarter campaign failed, but we ended up building anyway after one of the silicon manufacturers spotted the project and provided some FoC devices which changed the economics.

We spent oodles of time on it, learned lots, build a fairly simple product but ended up selling it through some of the bigger RPi retailers. It was all an excellent learning experience, and ignoring our time we made about 50p out of the entire batch of a thousand. Factor in our time and it was a complete financial disaster, but we were young and carefree and had fun doing it!