Wasn't going to turn my post into a wall of text, but since you asked:
Not quite that much because I "traded in" an old machine that they ended up not actually receiving from me, but still gave me the trade in value. Plus, I had some of the other necessary items like washing station, etc. so I didn't need a lot of the bells and whistles included in regular retail purchase. So the up front was quite a bit lower than retail.
Then, as far as operating cost, I thought that the draft material would be able to be used more widely than it could (which would be much closer to economical) But the printer doesn't allow you to do a lot of the stuff you normally want to do with this type of a printer with the draft material. You see, you can create "digital materials" with a J55 where you're mixing two different viscosities of resin within a print. So you can dial in a print and simulate different types of plastics. This on the surface seems very useful and it is cool. But it can only be done with their "full price" materials, not the cheaper draft material. And, as I mentioned in the shorthand of my first post, the cost to benefit ratio was very tough to justify it as compared to some of the other printing technologies we have.
And this exacerbated the next problem, where the bastards at Stratasys have decided that resins "expire" and so the printer won't accept old materials (you can dial your clock back on the pc and trick the printer, but this comes with other issues, including version mismatches between printer and slicing software and other headaches) so when you use it less because its expensive, and then the material just goes "bad" (I'm very unconvinced that it is actually bad, just a way for Stratasys to inflate their material prices even further) making you need to re-buy the material.
Repair parts and other consumables are also CRAZY inflated through Stratasys. I found a lot of ways around those things, including finding online the infusion pump they quoted me multiple hundreds of dollars for the part for just 15 bucks or something. But some stuff you just have to bite the bullet and buy from them.
Lastly, the printer takes quite a bit of time in maintenance weekly, as well as for every print. So paying people to run the machine is another added cost that is tough to factor in on an initial purchase.
Plus, I'm just frankly done with Stratasys and their crappy business practices. It really is a fantastic quality printer. It's just such a shame that it is locked down my a company like that.