IMO this is an area where something like kickstarter might come in handy.

Let some hackers who are willing to wait a bit pay the cost a while before anything ships so they have a somewhat guaranteed amount of purchases before they even start.

Of course that introduces other problems (like making it harder for the "target audience" of people learning to get ahold of), and you still need to do a lot of work to make sure you don't over/under charge, but it's an option that seems like it could work well for them.