The Finish and Swiss most likely have no clue what the final full life-cycle costs will be. No-one knows this cost. The US who sold it knows a bit more than the Finns and the Swiss, but not even they know. Time will tell.
The F35 program has overrun it's costs over and over. The purchase price of the F35A (the conventional version) is being artificially low as a lot of the costs have been pushed onto the F35B and F35C models so they can offer an attractive price for their exports.
It's all politics at the end anyway.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Note that you need to compare with competing programs.
Notably, F35 can be actually seriously produced (unlike say its supposed competition Su-57)
I used a really thin ceramic based paint coating and it was really difficult to apply in a uniform manner. I can’t imagine how hard getting stealth coating onto a fighter jet is.
Specific figures will differ depending on how exactly one calculates acquisition costs. These numbers differ depending on the acquiring country, the block numbers, etc. But as rule of thumb the F-35 cost is roughly 10 million USD cheaper than the much less capable Gripen. This is notable as the Gripen is being marketed as the cheaper alternative. The F-35 has much higher operational costs (mostly due to the costs of maintaining stealth coating), but here's the opinion of the Finish and Swiss governments on full life-cycle costs from the article:
> However, both the Swiss and Finnish authorities argued that the F-35 was the best cost/benefit investment, if its full life-cycle economics were taken into account.