Honestly with the prices on Ali or even eBay-direct-from-China-shipping it seems rather glaringly obvious that there are huge externalities attached to all of this.

Personally, I was never hugely into the connecting devboards together style of work (which is of course the fastest/best way to get results), which is pretty much only possible with "1 $ style" devboards, because eval boards have never been single-dollar items. I usually handwire everything or roll my own PCBs. I try to be conscious with component selection, if I can get components made in first-world countries I will pay the usually higher (1.5-3x) price tag for that. This is however somewhat difficult, because the country of origin is often hard to find out for components (and weirdly enough, many manufacturers are pretty quiet about it, even when it's made in the EU, Germany, UK, ...). It's a hobby, I don't really need to count pennies.

Is that good or bad? Do you want the likes of adafruit / sparkfun and similar to exist or do you just want to buy everything direct from the parts suppliers at the source? Neither answer is perfect.

If you choose direct from the supplier then don't expect the same level of support as adafruit since you've voted away with your purchasing power any sufficient margin to support it.

Most of the benefits the locals provide are tutorials, support and shorter delivery from local inventory.

The race to wafer-thin margins has consequences.

Yes, but you get it fast, with service and no random customs problems. Sometimes for things that don't scale ($20 vs $10 one time) it may not matter much for some.

I assume Adafruit is fast for people on the east coast or if you pay a lot for shipping. I looked into Adafruit's west coast distributors but they only have a few of their products. (Jameco carries some Adafruit stuff but typically not what I'm looking for.)

Digikey also carries a decent selection of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts. Shockingly, it’s generally free overnight shipping cross-border to Canada. Ordering stuff from Aliexpress is cool, but having it on your doorstep in less than 24 hours is incredible.

Yeah, that's nice. Digikey is in Minnesota so I assume that helps for some parts of Canada. It looks like it's only free for orders above $100?

Amazon is worth a look too, particularly for Prime users.

Yeah, one of the options they have is "Incoterms DDP" (delivered duty paid). From what I can tell, they'll sometimes stick the packages in a truck and ship them out from Winnipeg instead of shipping directly from their facility in Thief River Falls. Saves all of the painful customs things that FedEx and UPS seem to screw up on a regular basis.

Edit: also, I generally have a hard time keeping my order under $100, so I guess I've never actually seen what the shipping fee would be :D

100% markup is keystone for retailers; anything less than that is tight margins.

I guess that's the point being made by ancestor comments: When prices are that low, it's hard to make enough to support a large operation for (relatively) low volume, even if individual margins are high.

Plus, until recently, you could order things from aliexpress or banggood etc. at low Chinese prices and not even pay shipping (that was essentially free).