Minting NFTs in Solana. Transaction fees

I have already prepared the Candy Machines for minting an NFT collection in the Solana network, and I am testing the Mint process using its Devnet. Even if you can find a lot of tutorials about how to prepare the candy machines, there are some questions that I am still not able to find the right answer and I think that could be useful for other users.

1. Does the Mint need to be one by one? If a user would like to buy, for example 50 NFTs, does it require approving 50 transactions and pay 50 times the fees (using Phantom or any other wallet)? I assume that yes, because every minted NFT is a new contract. Am I right?
2. I am successfully doing a Mint in the Devnet using my Phantom wallet in order to determine the fees. For a single NFT, the transaction fee reflected in the wallet is 0.012SOL = 2.16$ at this time. It seems really expensive based on what a transaction in Solana should cost. How are these fees calculated? Is this the normal fee price that a user pay for minting 1 NFT?

To answer both your questions:

1. The mint does not need to be one by one (from a mint site I am assuming is what you mean). You can string multiple transactions together like what this repo has achieved: https://github.com/maxwellfortney/next-candy-machine

Note: this repo is for cmv1 which is no longer supported but can be simply adjusted to work with cmv2 as the transactions themseleves should be similar.

2. Yes, that is a normal fee for minting. Transactions (transfering tokens or sol) themselves on solana are extremely cheap but storing data is not as cheap. To store data (such as is required by an NFT as they need a URI for the metadata) some "rent" costs are involved, as defined in the solana docs https://docs.solana.com/implemented-proposals/rent. Basically you have to pay for the NFT to store this data and exist which is the minting fees you are witnessing, a tiny fraction of the price you pay is for transferring the NFT to your wallet.