> They are really not printing money with that technology.

Not until it becomes widespread. For-profit companies are not charities and they patent things for a reason.

So it takes more than 5 dollars. You also need a gateway but you can get these for 99 dollars. Still this technology has a very low barrier to entry for such a long range and low power capability.

For people reading this since I'm certain wienke knows this, you can also do point to point or mesh LoRA between cheap devices (e.g. Meshtastic). You don't necessarily need a multi-channel gateway, depends on what you want to do.

You only need a gateway for LoRaWAN, you can do point to point or mesh LoRa without a gateway.