DeletedUser313
The baseline hardware needed to run GOS and offer basically minimally acceptable smartphone performance is going to cost around $500 when purchased at scale (hundred thousand unit orders kind of scale).
That doesn't include design costs, assembly, packaging, shipping, compliance/legal, validation & testing, etc. Just the cost of the physical components.
Absolute bare minimum price for an end user to get a bespoke GOS phone in hand would be around a thousand USD.
At that point you have already priced out a lot of the market. So your potential market for these phones becomes the people able/willing to drop a thousand plus on a phone. For most of those people/entities the price is secondary to features.
Very few people willing to spend $1500 plus on a flagship today would be willing to daily drive a phone with substantially worse performance/features but better security. A lot of them (relatively speaking) would be willing to spend an additional thousand bucks on security/privacy.
Since market size and economics mean that (at least for the first few generations) there would only be 1, maybe 2, SKU's you have to target the luxury market.
Privacy & security cost money.
Right now, GOS is massively subsidized by Google and the broader market willing to trade privacy/security for cheaper prices. Google sells more than ten million Pixel's each year, they also have Googles corporate infrastructure & market power behind them to lower their per unit costs. This reduces the hardware costs for a GOS phone substantially.
A bespoke GOS phone wouldn't have those advantages and so would have a (substantially) higher per unit cost.
When you get right down to it, the hardware cost for a bare minimum model and an ultra flagship model would very likely be less than $200 USD. High end models aren't expensive because of the hardware in them but because the market is willing to pay that price for them and they are massively more profitable. The display on a P9 Pro costs Google probably $20 bucks. A bare bones LCD display is going to run you around $5 at the same order volume. That $15 difference in purchase price is a hundred plus dollars in finale sale price.
Going from 128gb to 1tb is going from $10 to around $80 in cost but is $500 in final sale price.
So the question isn't really whether or not you would spend a thousand bucks for for the feature differences of a P9P 1tb vs. a P8a but whether you would spend ~$200 for those feature differences - because that is the difference in actual cost to produce.