zombees

In general you can't really do bga with osh park without fudging their specs significantly. Some have been able to do it but you tend to end up with peeling traces. Also, don't forget shipping on all the bits and pieces.

It's worth noting that for a lot of applications (anything with UART for instance) you still want to use a crystal. Almost all of the micros on the market have an RC on die but it's usually better to just pop a crystal on the board. The PLL supports it, though you'll lose a couple precious pins.

I feel like its about time Lattice got some attention. Their development environment is way nicer for enthusiasts and it's usually pretty easy to use their stuff in projects. Xilinx by comparison only has free IDE support for some mid range SOCs (Zynq-7000) which tend to cost a lot on their own and the IDE is a living nightmare to use.

Instead of 30? No, it typically costs a lot to do one-off pcbs. Even through a batching service (where you share a large panel with other people), they'll still usually make you pay for a few of them. Also, all of the components are going to cost way more if you just want to buy one of each. Headers are tenths of a cent per pin but from digikey you'll probably have to buy a strip for a dollar or so. Likewise with crystals, vregs and caps.

ice40UL1K is a $1.60 for a single bga unit on digikey. Probably well under a dollar wholesale. Add in a few cents for a crystal, some capacitors, pin headers, a vreg, and the pcb, probably costs $1-2 to produce.

I should mention that someone capable of doing hobby level bga work could easily make their own at around $30 through a pcb batching service. In terms of electronic complexity, it looks pretty trivial.