Just the quadcopter itself, minus the Skycontroller, is $499. Which is pretty much unheard of for a ready-to-fly quadcopter with a camera and with FPV functionality.

However, I can tell you from experience that piloting the machine with a smartphone or tablet screen by itself is nearly impossible. You can use a dual-analog game controller with your device for something approaching traditional remote control, but your range and performance will be extremely limited without the boosted antenna on the Skycontroller. You basically need it.

I briefly owned a Bebop but found it to be completely unsatisfactory in every detail. The camera point-of-view control does not provide you nearly the range of freedom as the advertisements would lead you to believe, and the frame rate and sharpness are also poor. I also found the craft to be clumsy to fly and extremely unreliable. The standard response to any connection failure is for the craft to cut all rotors and drop out of the sky like a rock. Reconnecting after losing signal requires exiting and restarting the Freeflight app, and ALSO requires unplugging and reconnecting the battery in the craft to reboot it. I flew mine indoors in a large area several times, and found even at very close range (50 feet or less) it would randomly drop connection and refuse to connect within 3-5 minutes of flight, all the time, every time. Because of that I would not dare fly it outside.

Parrot also advertised a fly-by-waypoint system using the Bebop's onboard GPS at the machine's launch, which was a lie. To this day, the Bebop does not have that functionality despite it being advertised on the retail packaging. The emergency return-to-home feature on the craft also does not work -- the only way to get an automated flight to home is to activate it from your controller/tablet/phone, while you still have connection.

So despite all the starry-eyed reviews and adulation piled on the Bebop on the internet, it's still a seriously half-baked product. The comment higher up the chain here is correct: For the kind of money you'd spend on the Bebop plus Skycontroller you can buy some variant of the DJI Phantom and get a machine that's well developed and likely to actually work, AND comes with a high quality and functional controller.