Sure, but with a fleet of a good fraction of 100 satellites, it's not going to be cheap however you slice it, especially given the launch costs back then. 70-odd satellites in the initial constellation, 15 launches, that's a billion in launch costs and over a third of a billion in satellite manufacturing costs, aside from R&D. Nevertheless, they easily saved... at a minimum $3 billion and as much as maybe $7-10 billion by doing it the way they did. Which was, I'll point out, a very revolutionary practice that has been widely regarded by the industry as being such. If they hadn't done it that way they wouldn't have been able to get off the ground at all, most likely.
Also of note, the launch market has changed for the better considerably since then. Despite having the same constellation size for Iridium Next and slightly larger satellites (by about 15%) they'll be able to get them deployed with only 10 launches at a total cost of $490 million.
Of course, now the market has largely caught up with their vision so they're doing a lot better financially.
