How much do you think a $20 AirTag costs to actually manufacture?

I don't know how much it costs to manufacture, but nobody is selling a UWB tag for $5. For $5, you only get BLE.

I certainly can't claim to have ordered and received one, but there are absolutely $5 UWB devices for sale on AliExpress, and that's before any bulk discount.

If Apple sells them for $20 it's highly likely some random Chinese seller can make money at $5.

Can you link me to one? I haven't found any of those.

I'm looking for a source of like ~100 UWB-only ones aiming for about 2~3 weeks of battery runtime on a pack of 2~3 AA batteries. Mostly depends on what voltage end the chips handle better: 2V low end, or 4.5V high end.

The aim is to keep track of where shared equipment is during the logistics phases of 39c3.

And, also, using the quite possibly wall-wart-piwered base station network to provide what's essentially rather precise indoor-GPS to users with sufficiently open FiRa hardware.