Most crowdfunding campaigns charge a cheaper price for the people who pre-order early, and then raise the price for people who order after the product starts shipping. If Zlatan Todoric’s interview with Phoronix can be believed, the bill of materials for the Librem 5 in 2017 was expected to be $300, so that would leave $300 to pay for development, but that was based on the expectation that Purism would have the phone ready in 17 months, whereas it took 39 months before Purism started shipping Evergreen, and Purism went over budget in the development of the phone.
When Purism announced on December 16, 2019 that it would have to increase the price to $749 in 2020 and the final price to $799, it made this statement:
One way that we reward early backers for their patience is by providing an introductory “early bird” price. When you are creating a new phone from scratch, in the early phases prices are incredibly rough estimates. After all, a number of factors from volume to time to suppliers all play a part in price and it’s difficult if not impossible to know all of your final costs years in advance. So you pick an estimate on the low side to reward early backers, understanding that eventually you will have to increase to your final price.
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We had to design the hardware from scratch and we also have to develop many drivers ourselves–everything that is not yet available as free software in upstream mainline Linux kernels.In early 2019 as we started to get better estimates for our costs, we realized we’d need to increase the price to at least $699–at the time what we thought would be the final price. Fast forward a couple of months and those estimates turned out to be optimistic. Once we knew our final costs for the mass-produced Librem 5 Evergreen batch we realized we’d need to increase the final price to $799.