With 4769 components on the board, that would suggest a cost per component of over 40 cents. Looking at JLCPCB prices for SMD assembly and components, I would have expected an order of magnitude less.
larger boards are also more difficult to work with in general. JLCPCB plays a few tricks to keep the costs down on the smaller boards, but once you go past certain limits, the price goes up significantly.
Specifically JLCPCB claims "$0.0017 per joint" for PCB assembly, which would be around 10k joints for the transistors, and another 5k for the resistors, LEDs and other parts, so around $25 + the parts cost.
Some other PCB manufacturer (edit: PCBway) I checked also didn't seem to charge more than a few hundred per fully populated board (for the board + assembly).
It's of course possible that that JLCPCB pricing goes way up with such parts counts, but the other manufacturer did ask for count + size before producing the automatic quote.
Edit: Didn't realize you were the project author - thanks for the response! I guess that's what hides behind "Final price is subject to our review" then. Still, looking forward to seeing this in person
so yeah.. maybe they're making them in some more expensive country or use some exotic components.
But actually, I'm thinking a nice framed picture might be pretty nice.