Ever been on Aliexpress? I was roughly converting prices from € to $ and adding some spare for tolerance, here’s what I actually paid:

LED Matrix: 5 for 6,33€ (that is 1,27€ each)

ESP32 C3 Supermini: 3 for 3,56€ (1,19€ each)

There’s scrap acrylic at my makerspace so I was guessing, make it 10€ and I’m at 23€ or so.

What numbers do you not believe?

Who’s doing the case? Who’s doing the buttons? Who’s gonna put it together? Testing? Programming? Flashing? How about handling returns? Packaging? Design for all of the above?

Well that’s the point of a DIY project, you are going to do it (if that’s the kind of project you want). I wasn’t saying you should build this thing yourself because the busy bar is bad, I was just giving some more data to the original commenter who said you can build something similar yourself for much cheaper.