Yeah, I'm somewhat worried about this as well as 1.5 million is not a lot considering that they actually have to ship phones in the end and can't just pour it all into R&D. I'm assuming that they'll be using mostly commodity hardware (i.MX 8M SoC plus Alibaba-tier chassis, lcd, capacitive layer, etc.) but even then they still have to put everything together and create a deliverable product with reasonably workable software, although I expect that they plan on leaning heavily on the KDE/GNOME/Debian communities. Probably going to flip a coin later this week to determine whether I'm going to back this or not.
$1.5m, and seemingly a team of somewhere between 18 and 27 people, they're going to need more funding. If they're paying $5k/person/mo (assume for now this includes things like taxes and overhead), that's one year's worth of money. On top of this, they have to cover things like FCC certifications, fees for getting manufacturing rolling and all the other fun stuff that comes with shipping physical product.
$1.5m does seem like a low target for a crowdfunded smartphone, but it's worth bearing in mind that the salaries of those involved will not be propped up solely by a single device. Purism already sell a range of laptops:
Wow, their laptops look great. Not cheap, but fairly priced. I hope they will still offer updated versions when I have to replace my XPS.
I'm not sure what their plans are, but a good punt would be do the form factor Wi-Fi only and use an external, optional COTS hotspot as their 'baseband.' I think their goals would be met, and they could realize some power/cost savings (with the lower cost Wi-Fi-only SKU).
A good punt would be to not build a phone?
Yeah and the project plan for PureOS >II looks interesting too. Lets do everything, at the same time!
Nevertheless, I wish them luck and hope they succeed.