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Why are tiny pieces of plastic so expensive?
(lemmynsfw.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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It's greed. There are alternative "interlocking toy brick" manufacturers, like BlueBrixx, that are cheaper than Lego.
Those are cheaper because they're made with much higher tolerances. You can 3D print crude legos for nothing more than the cost of filament. But they're not going to be any good.
General rule of manufacturing. Every time you decrease the tolerances by an order of magnitude, you increase the cost by an order of magnitude.
Bluebrixx are great! They’re also like 40% cheaper on average than Lego.
Intrigued I bought a ~8000 pieces set from Bluebricks for 250 euro.
The quality of bricks is strictly worse than Lego - there's no "click" when you put in place. No paper instruction. Small issues with building instructions pdf (e.g. brick in a wrong place). The bricks have random indentations from the manufacturing process. Lego also has some, but much less.
The set is fun to build, some of the techniques are more inventive than Lego, some are just meh.
For that price it's a steal, but if only brick quality matters, based on The Astronomer's Observatory, Lego is better, even if whenever they push the stickers at me I just want to go to Bilund and start slapping people all around.