Yes after literal decades of being behind schedule and billions upon billions of self-funded investment by Lockheed Martin (as well as the numerous subsidies from the USAF and international backers) to achieve a state-of-the-art high tech manufacturing capability. So if you discount all of those sunk costs it is very much cheaper. Gripen comes out to around $130 million per fighter if you include the cost of setting up a factory t. the Brazil deal for 36 fighters and a factory. Who knows how much F-35 costs on the same grounds, but considering Gripen, being a worse F-16, is built with relatively conventional 1970's metalworking technology that is fairly simple even for actual third world countries like Brazil or India to grasp, while F-35 requires a hyper cyber age gigafactory that is difficult for even the United States to master, I suspect the difference is rather steep.
You would expect the flyaway costs to converge since they are relatively comparable aircraft, but the timeframe and investment needed in the backing infrastructure is going to be massively more capital intensive than the Gripen. Which is why third worlders like Brazil are making Gripens and not F-35s.
So building 5,000 F-35's and keeping them around for decades is probably going to cost a lot more than building 5,000 Gripens and keeping them around for decades, naturally. Perhaps an order of magnitude more.
Building a Gripen is not fundamentally much different from building an F-16, or a Viggen, or even a Draken, in all seriousness.
