I'm an Industrial Designer as well as a certified Part 107 Pilot. I frequently see users remarking about the seemingly high prices of accessories like handles, floats, etc. As consumers, we are used to pricing levels for household products that sell 10's or 100s of millions of units per year. Because of those numbers, the manufacturing cost for them can be extremely low.
When you start making a product that has a much, much smaller customer base, say 100s or 1000s, the cost of making the parts goes up tremendously. I've developed several handy and useful drone accessories but I can't get the cost down below $75 so I've never made or marketed them. There seems to be a threshold that customers won't cross and it seems to lie below $50 for simple items without electronics. If you can't find off-the-shelf parts and kit-bang something together, you are left with 3d printing, cnc milling or casting parts. Those technologies are all human labor intensive, low yield and expensive.
To be able to make any money, i.e. a living, you must sell your product for 3 to 4 times what it costs you to make it. That covers overhead, taxes, insurance, etc. So, it's likely the seller of the handles has gotten the cost of production down to somewhere around $8-$15. The original manufacturer has to make a profit and so does the reseller. So, knowing that there are really only 1000s (if that) of potential customers for this product, I think that $44 is a fair price. Custom molds and tooling for an injection molded plastic part can cost upwards of $20K. You'd have to sell 2000 of them at $10 just to break even on the molds. No one can afford to stick their neck out that far for a product that may or may not sell. So, you are left making them in small batches using other methods. And, it just costs a lot more. Again, I think $44 is kind of amazing for this.
We all have to remember, this isn't like Walmart selling 20 million usb cables. At those numbers things are cheap to make. We are talking about a somewhat custom and made on demand product and it's expensive to do so. And to put it in perspective, if I'm flying a job that I'll make $1000 on, having handles that improve safety and only cost $44 is pretty darn cheap. I guarantee you, should someone get severely hurt from catching a drone without handles, you'd wish you'd have paid "any" price for a pair of simple handles.
