Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.
Currently anyone can try it out for free for the next 3 days, so you can decide for yourself if it's a "scam", if you're able to deal with the bugs, or if it even works on your hardware:
In terms of cost, this game gets a lot of flak for its marketing tactics. You don't need to buy anything beyond the $40-45 starter pack. Just about everything else can be earned/rented/looted/hijacked/borrowed in-game.