Total cost of ownership of a cat is considerably more than $300, unless you plan to make your cat hunt its own food, fail to license it, and never take it to the vet.
I’m a pretty big fan of my live cat and the software she shipped with, I’m not interested in building a robot cat, and I think TCO is the wrong criterion to base this decision on in the first place—but a cat costs real money to take care of correctly, and people need to consider TCO if they adopt an animal.
Depending on where you are you're can do the former outside, with you feeding in the off-season and that, and the latter is perspective: you don't _need_ more than vaccinations and depending on how they eventually end up, possibly euthanization.
But those shouldn't be that expensive, really.
Anti-suffering advocates caused the process of slaughter for general farmed meat animals to get researched a lot, so that now we know fairly well how to kill a tame animal without causing suffering.
IIRC the one requiring the least skill and least likely to accidentally cause great suffering is the "inert gas asphyxiation", i.e., displacing the air in the poorly ventilated space the animal is in with commonly nitrogen, until the Oxygen concentration drops so low the brain just passes out.
We know from many pilots who fucked up how humans experience oxygen deprivation to the extend that your copilot already passed out. The become loopy, incoherent, but notably not with memories of when asked during it that they feel bad/suffering.
And well, even when liquid the nitrogen sufficient to flood an their normal room would only cost like 1~5$.
And it carries reasonably in basically just 5~10l versions of those fact insulated tea/coffee bottles for being on the go and having hot tea when making a stop after say 5 hours.
So yeah, essentially, it shouldn't cost more than 200~300$ during the entire lifetime to have appropriate medical supervision for a normal cat.
More than that is due to either greedy vets or cat owners who spend a lot on fancy healthcare to get a few extra years of lifespan for their cat. But from a pure financial POV, most of that isn't worth it: generic cats are very not hard to breed/multiply.
Who in their right mind thinks that buying a pet for a few months and euthanizing it once you're bored of it is a better idea than buying a robot cat? This type of thinking is why the shelters are full of unwanted animals.
