Why did Mark Shuttleworth need a $32 million goal for crowd sourcing an Ubuntu phone and Marc Dillion needed only a $380,000 goal to crowd source the Jolla Tablet? While this is a serious question, feel free to think of this as a joke that you can provide the punchline to!
Well the reason why Canonical asked for tens of millions of dollars is because they wanted to do a full manufacture of Ubuntu phones. This they are more than likely doing something very different. A full manufacturing cycle does cost millions but because they are making more they actually cost less per unit. So similarly its how tesco can afford to have so many own brand stuff because they do full cycles and ship them only to their own stores. It keeps costs low because they are doing bulk and that allows for a certain amount of failure and thus allows for less than half of something to be sold to make a profit on it. With Ubuntu phone they were obviously starting from the ground up and a lot of the technology they were using was new at the time, not new now since Apple picked up the screens and the batteries are getting into new phones soon ish. It would have also paid for them to speed up development a bit on the phone so they could get the showstopper features in there like the convergence stuff. All that being said if you think the Ubuntu phone indiegogo wasn't anything more than an attempt to gain some publicity for free you are pretty stupid. Other than that it gave them a lot of info about who to actually target with their first phones and that is not the 400 dollar market but slightly lower than that between 200 and at max 400. And all the indications the BQ phone is the cheaper side of that spectrum and the Maizu phone is slightly more expensive but still not pushing past 400.