Yea. I'm in the US.
$500 would be amazing. This project has already costed around $550. Not just in filiment, but finishing stuff, sand paper, paint, linex for the helmet, and rapter liner for the top coat of some sections.
The linex treatment for the rest of the armor will cost about $200 to 300.
Once it's all said and done, I will probably spend about $1000 on it. I'm working on a air circulation system for the helmet and the rest of the suit, a 1000 lumen lighting system for the helmet, and what I'm most exited about, a full HUD.
A developer friend and I are working on code that will take GPS, DMR radio, LoRaWan, and bluetooth and map it all to a HUD. It will have a real map in the bottom corner, fake ammo tracking for my dummy gun, for fun I might build a real tracker for my airsoft gun just to show it off. Using wideband bluetooth, I will be able to give anyone I want a small tracker and it should show up in the HUD as friend. It would be super cool to do foe tracking, but short of LiDAR or radar there's no way to track people without a Bluetooth tag.