POD prices/costs

There are all kinds of reasons why you should not self publish, unless the material is highly specialist belonging to a small niche market that you understand and can sell into. Generally, self-published books are sold by the author alone; how many friends do you have, or how good are your marketing and selling skills? Print runs vary, most are POD (print on demand) unless you print a huge number, there will be no profit even selling direct as small runs are expensive per book.
Secondly, unless you want to throw even more money away, you do your own editing. Once you have something completed, edited and polished why not query agents to see if you can have it published commercially?
Having something self-published even if for very good reasons does not give you a publishing credit and unless it's particularly good, it may surface in the future when you are trying to establish yourself as a serious writer and bite you somewhere painful.
As a publisher said to me recently, "if it's good enough, it'll sell. You just have to keep trying"
There are exceptions of course, and some self-published books have had quite a different outcome, but this is rare IMO.

I'm shifting this over to the POD forum and have tweaked the title. If you want a different title then just PM the mod of the POD forum and they'll change it for you. And don't forget to pop back to the Newbie forum to introduce yourself .