Mopar Performance Carb 5.7L Crate Engine

For what it's worth, I pretty much had a running and driving swap for around $5000 invested, engine included. Bought one with a dropped valve seat that pretty well trashed the one cylinder. Had it sleeved and got a replacement piston free with some other parts. That and a new refurbed head were about the only things I replaced in the engine. The bearings looked good and I was cheap, so I reused them and haven't had a problem yet. Went with a carb swap because I didn't have the money at the time to do a full high pressure fuel system upgrade the way I wanted (in tank pump). So engine, Indy intake (re-used carb from 318 I had in car), MSD box, mounts, headers (could have used other stock manifolds for less, but was going to do headers eventually), flywheel, various accessory pieces like belts, bolts, hoses, etc. and had it on the road. Had to swap power steering to manual, but can almost do that for nothing if someone wants to trade parts with you. Sell off what you take out and you can possibly make a few hundred back.

Injection is sort of a different story, but there are now several good options for that. The Megasquirt market has become much more friendly with the new Hemis and there are a few plug and play systems out there for them now. If you get the factory harness and computer with your engine that's probably still the cheapest way to go (I didn't get any electronics with mine, another reason I went with a carb swap initially). FAST has an EZ EFI system that uses factory multiport injection as opposed to the throttle body units, but I've yet to see someone use it (it was my original plan for injection). It's basically just the harness and computer, so you save the cost of their all-in-one throttle body injector setup, bringing the system down to around $900 last I saw. You'd still have to swap to a cable throttle body and run the ignition with an MSD or something though, so overall system cost is probably similar to others. I got stupid lucky and scored a Megasquirt 2 setup with tons of other parts I didn't need that I sold off to bring my total computer cost down to something like $200. I splurged on an aluminum fabbed tank with in-tank pump for the fuel system though.

All that said, figure if you had a stock engine with no electronics, you can get standalone systems for around $1200 now. So a blank plage swap might be engine cost + $1200ish for computer (if you go injection) + swap parts (mounts, exhaust, accessory bits, etc.) $1500-2500+ for a rough estimate. You could probably do your whole swap for the cost of that crate engine, but that engine is basically turn-key, so all you'd need would be the swap parts. There are always deals to be found on parts, so patience also plays a big part in cost.