Hi, author here. I went ahead and did the math based on offerings in raspberrypi.dk since that's the reseller that the official Raspberry Pi website directs me to as someone living in Estonia.

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB: 92.87 EUR

"Armor Aluminium heatsink case for Raspberry Pi 4": 19.01 EUR

Official Raspberry Pi power supply: 10.80 EUR

32GB microSD card: 12.17 EUR (and on sale)

At this point the subtotal is 134.85 EUR (~142 USD). Budget about 10-20 EUR on shipping on top of that, so about 150 EUR.

And to run two SATA SSD-s off of the Raspberry Pi, you'd need an extra USB to SATA adapters. ICY BOX ones are quite good, those are about 15-20 EUR each, and are unlikely to work properly because of power limitations. I've done the testing in the past, one SSD is OK, two is a bit too much for the board, so you'd need to rig them up with external power, adding cost.

To have something similar, we're looking at about 180+ EUR (~190 USD) worth of gear to replicate what we'd find with a Zimaboard, and with trade-offs and inferior results (USB-SATA is worse than plain SATA).

I think it's a fair comparison, at least with EU market prices.