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Ouch: The Raspberry Pi 5 just hit an eye-watering $385
(www.pcworld.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
At this point we can probably take an efficient full-blown PC in a mini format, and get something sensibly similar for less. It might even be possible to throw some GPIO USB in there if that's what you need.
You could use and esp32 and connect over serial for gpio
It's been like that since the Pi was around $150 tbh, at least when looking at used hardware as a comparison.