I mean, I've made 50x what I invested in JUCE already, and its only been a year of development .. but yeah, I guess it is pretty expensive when you are just getting started. Still, the Personal Use -> Indie step is an attainable one, and it shouldn't be terribly difficult to recover the cost relatively quickly once you come up with something, built with the Personal license, that might finally be qualified for an Indie release.
Pretty expensive for indie devs, though.