Do you agree with their pricing?

They justify it as they have spent a lot of money in R&D, but I feel almost $1,000 on top of the manufacturing charge is pretty high given there is almost no human cost/marginal cost for each new order. They then charge an extra $150 for the source files. Every iteration is considered a new design so the fees would rack up.

But on the other hand they seem to guarantee the board is electrically sound.

Well, I tried selling to the hobby market in the $150-$200 range because I figured hobbyists would be more forgiving if it didn't have advanced features. The market was completely uninterested (which may have more to do with my lack of marketing skills at the time, but I think there is still some truth that you can't immediately go for low cost when doing something like this). After reflecting on how mine turned out, I agree that the fees need to be higher. There is always room to come down later once the software is more mature.

Setting a low price puts you in the hobby market, and hobby engineers are some of the most penny-pinching people out there. They will spend weeks working on something they could buy for $30 and at the end say they saved money.

If you are selling to businesses, those problems mostly go away and you can get real money as long as you make sure you deliver stuff that works, and in the time you said you would. Having an engineer make a new board revision will easily cost more than $1000 for anything but the most trivial boards.

I have a small side business writing arduino code and building simple controller prototypes. A lot of the code I write is in that price range and is written as I sit in front of the TV. The most interesting thing I've discovered is that hobbyists don't mind paying for code, but they really don't want to pay anything but the lowest possible prices for hardware even after it's been explained why the dirt cheap Arduino peripherals are often crap and spending just a few dollars more for better designed stuff is worth it. AliExpress has firmly anchored the price of hardware at close to $0.

The only ones who take me up on my offer to write all the code and assemble the hardware are businesses. Hobbyists will struggle for weeks to save a few bucks.

My best customers are small or micro businesses who need a simple thing automated but the project size is below the threshold that engineering services firms want to deal with. Many of them are engineers themselves who just want to farm the task out and get it over with.

My original idea was that I saw a hole in the market that could be filled by code on the level of PLC programming, but on more flexible hardware. I'm still sure that the hole exists, but it's not clear just how scalable my approach is.