The $1000 myth | opiniomics

*chuckles* I guess only people outside of sequencing needs to be educated on this .. 

Now, it's possible Broad, BGI, Sanger etc can get below $1000 for the reagents due to sheer economies of scale and special deals they have with sequencing companies – but then remember they have to add in those extra charges (2-5) above.

Obviously, Illumina don't charge themselves list price for reagents, and nor do LifeTech, so it's possible that they themselves can sequence 30x human genomes and just pay whatever it costs to make the reagents and build the machines; but this is not reality and it's not really how sequencing is done today.  These guys want to sell machines and reagents, they don't want to be sequencing facilities, plus they still have to pay the staff, pay the bills, make a profit and return money to investors.
http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/the-1000-myth/