There are two recipes for each tier starting with standard machinery.   The expensive one is intended as a "bootstrap" towards unlocking the cheap recipe.  Once you research steel processing, you'll be able to make standard machinery much cheaper, but you'll need to start mass producing nickel.  
Please note I haven't fully tested all the advanced tiers, especially late game tiers.  So let me know if you think any of the later game recipes need to be re balanced.