I'm a little confused about what we are valuing, and what "cost" we are coming up with. Depending on how you view it, the cost can be a wide spectrum.
If you have 5 frames of brood (or some people use 3 frames of brood, one of food, and one of foundation), a queen, and a cardboard box, what could you sell each of the items for. Most frames of brood go for about $20 each in this area, based on my experience. A queen, on average, is worth $20-25. The box is worth about $2. So, if you were to piecemeal it out, it would cost $122-127.
Or you can value it based on the out of pocket expenses you incurred. The cardboard box would cost you about $5. The JZBZ cell that the queen came from would cost about $0.10. The frames cost you about $2 each (assembled, w/ foundation). That means your out of pocket expenses are $15.10. The bees really do the rest of the work for you. Each queen that failed should be accounted for in a mating situation, but you aren't selling the ones that fail, you are selling the one that didn't. When the customer drives away with a queen, what was your cost to produce THAT queen. Not all queens divided by all queens sold. Just THAT queen. The box also doesn't count in my opinion. Most in my area transfer into your equipment, or pack it up in a cardboard box. You keep the wooden nuc box, so you don't sell it.
Next you could look at the cost it took you to produce ALL your nucs, and divide it by the price you sold ALL your nucs for. If you make 100 nucs in the spring, and each one cost you $15.10 to make, plus another $25 each of woodenware, plus another $10 worth of feed and treatments, and you end up with 50 viable nucs for sale, each nuc cost you $80.20.
Or you could look at the cost of the ENTIRE operation. If you need a hive to pull brood from, how much did that hive cost you? $200 new? How much in feed, treatments, time, gas, mileage, did it cost you per hive? How many hives are you running? If it cost you about $100 per hive to maintain them, and you have 100 hives that you pull nucs from, you only pull one round of nucs from each hive, and your expenses per nuc are the same as above, your expense then becomes $280.02 per nuc. Or if you add in the cost of the hives themselves, it would be $680.20 per nuc. But those numbers aren't really accurate. You would have kept and maintained those hives whether you were making nucs or not. And the cost to acquire the hives isn't accurate, because you get to keep them and reuse them next year.
Or you can look at lost opportunity cost. If you could have used that same hive for pollination and gotten $50 per hive, plus another $70 in honey, you now lost $120 per hive. Add that to your costs above, and you are between $135.10 and $800.20 per nuc, again assuming a 50% take.
So it could cost you anywhere from $15 to $800 to produce a nuc. Depending on what you consider a "cost" to be.