the market is really small, so not only everything costs a lot to produce, the price hasn’t level out at all yet, so ppl will be selling these at wildly varying costs, which means you just have to look more

you’ve got everything from ~700$ development boards from sifive to inexpensive boards like this 🤷‍♀️

(if you’re curious, i left the link in another comment in this thread, as i said, the board is available for ~20$)