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You can buy this dev board to play around with and learn FPGA for $75, and it has extensive documentation and resources to help you

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11953

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But that's not a high performance FPGA. Believe me, I have a ton of FPGAs at home (starting even cheaper than that), and I write about them all the time: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=fpga

However if you're doing the sort of work which isn't just hobbyist stuff, you're going to spend 1000s on a board. This is the sort of thing commercial developers will be using: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/ek-v7-vc707-...

If you're building a commercial product, a 3k dev board sounds incredibly cheap. My company spends orders of magnitudes more on licenses for an IDE extension (resharper).

Absolutely. However I guess you'll also want to deploy your FPGA application at some point, which means buying FPGAs for all your servers too. So the cost is more analogous to the cost of a CPU/GPU than to the cost of an IDE/developer license.

You can get boards with a zynq 7020 on them for less than $200.

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