Ledger does not opensource half of their gear, and it is kinda potentially vulnerable with their silent upgrade capabilities and “cloud secret storage” (and their secure storage chip does not seem to have PUF and could be better for all we know but that’s not important really). I was terrified by that device when it just appeared long time ago, for upgrade-over-network is a potential for quite an attack; time proved that the company is mostly decent though and we haven’t seen much issues (we’ve seen some, but those were technical and you should expect that at cutting edge, even if by “technical” I mean some human psychology hacks).

So after studying the market (which is not as large as I hoped at some point lol), I came up with reasonable (conspiracy) theory of Ledger’s economy workings: there is no way those investments they’ve attracted would ever return really, there is just not enough adoption, even if they do have absolutely hats-off the best and most convenient software support for many, many currencies (yes, with its flaws, yes, sometimes tokens get stuck for months or years - but that’s cold storage device mostly, and cutting edge technologies, with prioritization of profit over technological advancement or even usability, one should expect that). On the other hand, there are people who want extremely secure wallet to store loads of tokens comfortably (the best storage is acid-free paper with carbon ink seed phrase in sealed vial, but that’s not enterprise nor comfortable and you can’t exit markets fast). These people can pay some engineering shop to develop some storage device, but then they would just be vulnerable to this shop’s potential backdoors. And device would be quite expensive, to cover the development costs.

So, to protect themselves, they could make lots of other people buy these devices too. Launch super aggressive marketing campaign, make device really cheap, add tutorials and very nice app, etc. Exactly what Ledger did - so indeed, these are very expensive devices for the investors, and thanks to their demand, quite cheap for the rest of us. Elegant solution, for once market working nicely.

I do not have a Ledger, I bought one when they just were released, played with it a bit, and gave it away to a friend who hoards crypto. This thing still does not feel right, but mostly, I do not hoard tokens, just use them for payment and research.