This article sort of glosses over the actual cost of designing the hardware. You should be able to get 500 units made working through a factory. Though minimum qty for parts can be as high as 5000, usually factories can find most components in smaller qty for 2-5x the price, especially since they already have relationships with suppliers. At $25-$35 bill of materials for something retailing at $250-$300 you're only looking at maybe $15k capital costs for the electronics and maybe another $15k for the molds (less if you can use one of the cheaper processes). $30k is pretty cheap from a capital expense if you're just talking about testing a market. The bigger cost is going to be all the engineering that goes into a product like this. It would be easy to spend $100k in billable hours to bring something as complicated as a webcam to market. You've got component selection and schematic work, board layout, industrial design work, firmware. If you're lucky you can slap together the equivalent of an arduino with an attached camera for initial prototypes but that'll only get you so far, and can still take weeks of development just to have a proof of concept. Hardware development is not for the faint of heart.
, and if you don't already have expertise in the webcam world, there's a good chance your product isn't going to actually be very good.