We're trying to bring down the cost, but please do keep in mind, that we are a very small company usually focusing on teaching kids coding, electronics, robotics, 3d modelling and printing, IoT, mostly STEAM subjects. We have a very limited budget. Since most of the kits like Legos and Mbot cost us quite a bit if we imported them in Pakistan, we designed our own. We started off with an open source 3d printed robot  and eventually designed our own as this design had limitations. This is based on our own chassis design and not the usual chassis that one can buy off Chinese websites. There are small circuits (power distribution, servo control etc) that we've designed too, to make it user friendly (just connect a few wires for extra sensors / actuators), although we do believe there is still a long way to go! Next step is to design a custom Arduino controller to include all the necessary controllers keeping the cost low again. 

Also we are designing some cool tutorials to go along (included in the cost) which are based on themes (Fire Fighting Bot, Astronaut Bot, Delivery Bot etc.). We've learned that kids like stories and programming a robot to solve a challenge within a story keeps them engaged. You can check out our activities as well as Codi in use on (www.facebook.com/learnobots).