pics

You can get a supply of good quality feed for a single chicken that will last months for about 20 bucks, if you shop around. Like, we get a 50lb bag of feed for our 2 1/2 birds. They each go through roughly a scoop a day, and the bag will last for about three months or so, depending on other critters helping themselves, spillage, etc.

I haven't checked chicken prices in a while, but our pet hen was ten bucks, and she's one of those fancy color versions that's supposedly hard to breed for.

You do need shelter for them too, so you have to factor that in. You aren't getting out for less than about 200 there, and that's going to be for a small number of birds.

If you're only getting one bird, and they stay inside with you, a crate that's decent sized is cheaper, but you'll want to look into chicken diapers because getting them pad trained is not certain, and they will poop a lot. We got lucky with our pet hen; she took to pad training well.

I haven't done the math for an exact cost per egg because I don't really keep track of exactly how much food the hen and only the hen goes through. But even feeding two of our own birds, a volunteer bird that showed up (she's the 1/2, since she spends enough time elsewhere that she doesn't eat that much) the squirrels and wild songbirds, we don't go through a dollar of food a day. More like half of that unless we do something to screw it up.

Now, they also supplement with bugs they find, safe food scraps we give them, and the souls of their human servants, so that is a factor in things. If they were only eating feed, it might shift things upwards a little.

Thing is, we're spoiled now. Because our hen is fed such a varied diet, and is pampered all to hell and back, her eggs are amazing. Blindfolded, I can pick her eggs every single time. The taste is so rich and deep that it pisses me off that all eggs don't taste like that.

We don't eat eggs super frequent, despite hers being the best I've ever had, so we sometimes give them away, and I've had people offer to buy them at over store prices.

That's probably more than you want to know since I reckon you were mostly joking, but there's a reason backyard bird keeping has taken off.

Edit: just in case anyone is seriously thinking about keeping chickens, you really do need more than one. They're social critters, and don't do well alone. The adults here can't work, so we can keep a small number of birds and make it work, but you can't just dump a single hen in a back yard and them be happy.