E-beam litho is...uh...not cheap. The system in the shared fab I use (WNF) costs around $450/hr with various discounts applied. Also, you're not going to get much done in just an hour. Now, maskless laser lithography is reasonably cheap...
However, you can get reasonable quality masks for $150ish, and if you don't care about wafer yield, you can fit all of the layers on one mask. It's 1970s tech - 1:1 contact exposure, but you can hit a few microns.
Fair enough, I guess we have different ideas of what cheap is, $4500 for a small prototype is fair enough for me (especially considering there's no other way to get ~50nm lithographic resolution), but on the other I run a funded company, so I suppose the story is different.
However, you can get reasonable quality masks for $150ish, and if you don't care about wafer yield, you can fit all of the layers on one mask. It's 1970s tech - 1:1 contact exposure, but you can hit a few microns.