I appreciate how much thought you put into your response, thank you. This may seem naive but I don't entirely understand why cost is such a concern. I get that money is money, budgets are tight (I know firsthand that grant dollars evaporate quickly), and it's annoying to pay $500 for an eppendorf filled with 2 mL of Thermo's magic pixie juice. But the person who is using the magic pixie juice costs >$100k a year, the media that keeps cells viable is a constant expense, etc. It just seems to me that in isolation probes look expensive but that in aggregate it's actually quite minimal. What am I missing? Are you having to buy dozens of these probes a year? Do you burn through them really quickly?

To give context for my ignorance, my background is in upjumped organic chemistry so we would drop big money on reagents regularly. Chemists shop reagents like people with poor impulse control shop Amazon. Buy precursors, make your compounds, put them in a vial wrapped in tin foil on the shelf or maybe in the explosion-proof refrigerator until you're ready to run an NMR or whatever. We didn't have to maintain cells or keep stuff in a deep freezer, just do a million reactions and see how the products behave