They raised material costs on some stuff in 1.06 because party/squad "units" are ungodly powerful.
I don't think unit costs are that big a deal and unit maintenance shouldn't be a problem either. There's no point in building up a huge military just to have it - use it to expand and conquer, and it'll not only pay for itself but feed the machine to grow even more.
Tech works the same way. The only way tech prices truly rise is if you sit stagnant. If you grow your cities (level them up), grow your empire, expand, then you gain more and more tech points per turn, more tech producing structures, etc, and the time to research techs doesn't really grow that much. If you were to just sit on a small empire forever, then yeah, things seem to get more costly.
The game isn't balanced that well in general but I don't think unit cost and maint are an issue, per se. The cost of some gear vs gear is way off and stuff like that, but overall unit cost and maint isn't that borked.
