https://www.phiconference.com/market/comparison-between-inp-and-silicon-photonics/

Interesting article about pricing of InP chips, integrated chips and packaging costs

From the article;

The fundamental and key advantage brought by InP is the ability to monolithically integrate compact and efficient optical amplifiers.

There are no practical solutions on the horizon for efficient monolithic integration of lasers and optical amplifiers. Instead much research effort has focused on hybrid integration of InP components onto silicon, which comes with significant coupling losses.

Cost
For the cost of integrated photonics solutions it is important to distinguish between chip cost and module cost. In many applications, particularly those requiring multiple optical and rf connections, the cost of the chip is only a small part of the total cost of a module, because the assembly and packaging costs are dominant. The technology that can integrate most functionality into a single chip will lead to the largest reduction of the costs of assembly and packaging and the associated loss in performance. So even if the InP chip is more expensive, the cost of the InP-based module will be lower, and its performance higher.

Hopefully POET is the solution.