You have to calculate the cost of paying 20 developers to work on the Librem 5 for 2+ years, then paying them for a couple more years to get everything working correctly.
Look at the number of companies who failed trying to produce their own mobile operating system:
- MontaVista (Mobilinux, stopped development in 2009)
- Motorola (EZX > MOTOMAGX, 2003-8, based on MontaVista’s Mobilinux)
- Nokia (Maemo > Meego, 2006-11; Symbian)
- JollaSoft (Sailfish OS still exists but nobody sells phones with it)
- Microsoft (gave up on Windows 10 Mobile in 2016)
- Intel (Moblin > Meego > Tizen)
- Samsung (Bada > Tizen)
- QNX (sold off to BlackBerry Inc.)
- RIM/BlackBerry Inc. (BlackBerry OS > QNX > Android fork, then gave up and sold brand to TCL)
- Palm (Palm OS > webOS, sold off to HP)
- HP (bought Palm, then sold webOS to LG)
- Psion (EPOC > Symbian), sold off to Motorola Solutions
- Canonical (gave up on Ubuntu Touch)
- Mozilla Foundation (gave up on Firefox OS)
- Cyanogen Inc (Android fork, went bankrupt)
- Yandex (gave up on its Android fork)
- Alibaba (gave up on its Android fork, Aliyun OS)
- Amazon (still maintains its Android fork, Fire OS, but its phones have been failures and its tablets are subsidized to sell books)
Almost every mobile operating system except for Android and iOS ended up being a financial failure and most of them have disappeared. If they exist, they only exist as community projects online. Although technically Tizen, webOS, Sailfish OS, and Fire OS still exist, good luck trying to buy a mobile phone with any of those operating systems preinstalled.
The few monitor kits that Purism sells will in no way cover the cost of developing convergence for the Librem 5. Given the dismal track record of mobile Linux, we do need to worry about Purism’s finances and how it will pay for developing mobile Pure OS (Linux/Wayland/GTK/phosh).
Purism is going to have to charge very high prices on its hardware to have the kind of margins that make it possible to pay for its development work and its small scale with high costs per unit.
If I were wealthy, I would gladly pay $1k extra to help finance the development costs of convergence, because I think it could become one of mobile Linux’s killer features that pulls new users to the platform.