Oooh, a discount! 
Why is Power Delivery, and USB-C significantly more expensive?
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Clearly it is not expensive enough,
it has been out of stock for months now!
I guess they never made enough units.
Id say you need to look at the increased benefits that usb-c gives comes at a relatively higher cost in complexity
Understand that PD basically allows the charger to send a LOT more energy to devices than USB has done before. Meaning that not only do you have to provide protection to the charger itself, but also to downstream devices. Because you know you āprobablyā dont want to send 20V down the usb-c line to your phone (hint that is very very very bad). Depending on the device you have to properly detect whats on the other side and send it the correct voltage.
And as you deal with higher power outputs, the protections you need to deal with it also increase complexity as well. A lot of hte complexity in lithium ion batteries is in fact the circuit board hidden inside that tells the charger āplease stop sending me 2A because otheriwse i might go into thermal runawayā kind of thing. If youāre wondering why ācheapā batteries have a tendency to explode on people, well lets just say they may āskimp outā on such thermal protections and such.
Which is also why now usb-c cables market is a lot pricer than yhou might think given how all other usb cables are basically dirt cheap. thatās because a bad usb, microusb, cable really at worst doesnt really matter much. Meaning skimping out on the spec doesnt really do much harm. But a bad usb-c cable can fry your laptop. What did you want to save 0.5 cents to not have a pulldown resistor to ground? Enjoy 20V across the data line! As a bonus you get to know what us Electrical Engineers call āMagic Smokeā. All electronics is actually powered by āMagic Smokeā (Intel and Mooreās Law are lies, weāre just learning to cram more magic smoke into electronics) . But remember you canāt put magic smoke back into your electronics. So if you saw āmagic smokeā come out, sorry your stuff is dead.
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Iām holding in my hand a phone which cannot handle more than 18W and a Powercore 10000 PD slim which cannot output more than 18W
Simply letting the cable charging 9V would suffice.
Bad cables can do really really things now that were basically not really issues before usb-c
Also if this happens
Me: hey im sorry but i see youāre charging your iphone 11 pro. Can I charge my really old iphone 6 please? Iām so despreate
you: Of course friend-o!
iphone6: Hi im a lowly iphone 6
charger: Yeah well youāre on usb-c so hereās 9V
iphone6: wait im an iphone 6! what is 9V? This is too much!
charger: Look youāre on usb-c hereās 9V just like go Super Saiyan or something and maybe youāll turn into an iPhone 11 pro
iphone 6: really could I be like my newer brethren? HRRRRAAAAAHHHHHHAAAAHHHAH
20 episodes later
iphone6: HRAAAAAAAA poof
charger: see that totally worked
Still the case it costs more. Why?
Example today these two are identical functionality, only the USB port is different.
I looked up pricing for the individual connectors since these really seem similar in every way but the connector. USB-C is still about 10-15% more expensive than USB-A, so factoring that plus the almost 3 times the contacts and maybe this explains the cost difference. They are starting to get cheaper I think but it probably takes time.
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Three times the contacts is a significant overstatement.
USB 3 has 9 unique points. USB-C has 16 unique points - more, but not triple. The repeated Grounds and vbus and other duplicates should be internally connected, so that cost should be covered in the connector cost.
And for USB-2 or charging, you can leave a lot of those wires in the USB-C connector out. You have a few more to support the PD communication, but not the entire set for high speed comms.
I think the higher prices today are a combination of factors - USB-C PD really is a little more expensive for parts and manufacturing. And the products that include them are newer and shinier, so command a premium even above that for the moment. Which helps balance out the R&D work that goes into making the new products. It will eventually settle out as just the cost difference probably.
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At a guess, patent or license fees for USB-Cā¦
Also might just be demands as well. They know they can get people to buy it even at the increased price
So thatās 0.0002% of their revenue as cost for the license.
So itās not that reason.
Possibly, so then that is our fault for paying the price?
I doubt thereās more R&D these are just physically connected differently, itās just different pins?
So on balance @ktkundy may be right, we pay more because we pay more.
I wish it wasnāt like that but it seems to be the only thing I can figure out. For example the 2 pack of nylon usb c cables that people could have won on the amazon live streams that they did cost abou $13 in silver color way. Mean while the same cable in silver in the lightning format is $26 probably do to the demand of the lightning cable with so many iPhone users. At least thatās what I could come up with to justify the price difference there, in other cases I really think it is what they think they can get us to pay for. Which is why so many products start high and then have various discounts. They want to find the sweet spot of what gets people to buy while still making them a nice profit
USB-C is 24 pins total with 16 being unique. It is not an overstatement in this case as there are 24 pins that need soldered down (a number of them are still tied together). In well made electronics you still solder down every connection for safety and durability. You would also not leave them out, as they become custom connectors and typically drive up price further. A surface mount USB-3 C style could command a 50% or more price increase for customization.
Good link, informative. Appears that you are correct that the connector is passing through all 24 points directly to the board - I assumed there were some optimizations on the connectors that would preconnect those points and only have one pin down for each unique point. Even so, the fact that a number are identical should reduce the required extra traces. But maybe it really works out to three times the typical soldering cost at that stage. I would still expect that cost to be significantly less than the extra cost for the connector itself.
The power electronics for PD shouldnāt be much different pricing than the chips already being used for IQ with multiple supported voltages. Some redesign, but the basic functionality is very similar.
My guess remains that for the price differences we are seeing, a significant amount of that can be chalked up to willingness to pay.
@professor Hopefully not an ongoing cost, but there was certainly some redesign to support the use of the PD standard instead of / in addition to the IQ standard. It is a fairly precise spec to follow, as many cheap cable makers discovered (or failed to discover) early on.