Pimoroni doesn't ship to my country. What does it matter if the shipping is the computer or not? I'll sell you a brand-new MacBook for $5 ($2000 shipping). The only thing that matters is the total that comes out of your wallet, and there is currently no way to get a Pi Zero for anything close to $5, at any quantity or from any provider.

I am somewhat confused by your statement. I am sorry Pimorni isn't available in your country however that just means that you can't get one for $5 as opposed to not being able to get them anywhere. Regards to shipping, my point was that the Pi and the shipping charges are two seperate things. I don't see why a Pi should be sold with free shipping just so the total amount spend is $5.

I agree that they should be ramping up production to meet the demand there is. I also find given the educational angle that 1 per order is a quite fair way to go about distribuing them given the lack of supply.

Because I can't even buy 10 and have shipping remain the same. The limit of 1 per customer means that I effectively have to pay $25 per Zero, which is completely the opposite if it costing $5.

When I'm hacking around on things, I hate to have only one. OK, it's not booting now and I don't understand. How do I quickly tell whether I fried it, the SD card is bad, or whether my code is bad? Use another one is the answer.

The point on the delivered cost being the key is that many of the boards that would also be suitable for simple tasks like this are either free/very cheap shipping, or at the worst case you can amortize the $5-10 shipping charge across 10 units instead of 1.

Exactly, I wouldn't mind paying for shipping if I could buy 10-20 units and amortize that way, but I haven't found anywhere that will let me.

I guess given this endevour was started with an educational focus the philosophy is on spreading the platform to the largest number of people, as opposed to letting a few people purchase many.

Maybe, but if I need five for what I want to do and can only buy one, it's not going to spread, since I won't use it.

Have you made contact with the RPi foundation? If you registered an interest for a larger number and state your educational goals they may well be able to help you out.

What are you looking to do with them out of interest?

But that's the thing, I don't need hundreds, I just need five or ten, so it's just amateur usage but one doesn't work (one could easily fry while experimenting).

I just make weird things out of them. My latest one is an RC car that I was hoping could get some mapping software onto, and turn fully autonomous, although an ESP8266 talking to a laptop is acceptable (and what I'm currently doing).