The costs you are minimizing are extremely high. Things like engineering, cost of manufacture, heck even the cost of a higher quality motor with less play/tight tolerances is vastly more expensive than you are letting on. Figure parts costs alone on a base model grinder are around 20 dollars for a 200 dollar sale price. Most of these are probably in the 200 dollar range with more time required to assemble.

In comparing a <200 dollar grinder to a 700 dollar grinder like the niche, the difference is night and day for parts, layout, and requirements for output. Plus the cost of higher quality burr sets and tight tolerance burr carriers.

The per unit costs associated with what is required to produce a small output, high quality part is high. How many units do you think each one of these companies makes? Compare that to baratza or kitchen aid. It’s not even in the same ballpark.

Obviously it goes towards insanity with the 3k dollar plus units, but then again many of them are commercial focused and can happily churn out hundreds of pounds of ground beans. Or into fully billet cnc machines one offs.