One hour of dev time? Are you paid half a million a year?
Chop it down by a factor of 2-4, and the question still remains: is $250 significant compared to the amount of work you're going to have to do to be competitive in the PDF-document processing space?
(for quick hacks, reverse engineering is good enough. you only need the standard once you're processing enough client documents that you need to know all about the long tail of possible but unlikely constructs your code may encounter, after all)
ISO is the international standards organization. A software developer in Indonesia earns $500 per month. Half your salary for one document is indeed a lot.
How much is 500g emping for you all? From a swiss source it's $25. That might give us a rough idea of price differentials...
[This is all moot though, because the PDF standard is available gratis.]
I hear (even for those based in US) that location plays a huge part, but even so, I assume specialization also played a big part?
In a world where I can work almost as easily 12 time zones away as 2, I'm not sure why these huge continental disparities still exist, but they do.