As I noted "Buying lots of things in order to resell them is more complicated than buying just one or two things for yourself". Both of the links you provided to cheaper sellers are not set up for bulk sales. The one on Amazon has a link for buying in bulk, but that only goes up to 999, and if you put 999 in for the quantity in their bulk page, it won't let you because they only have less than 100 pcs available. And the aliexpress link has a hard limit of 1 per customer. These are not reliable wholesalers, and when you're sourcing for retail, you need reliable wholesalers. When you're sourcing wholesalers for retail, you need someone that you can buy from in bulk repeatedly. Often you also want a wholesaler who'll let you set up payment terms (net-60 is pretty common) so you don't have to pay for the inventory up front. I'm fairly confident that if you looked and found a bulk wholesaler for this item that offers terms, the per unit cost is going to be closer to the Adafruit price than to the Aliexpress price you quoted. And then Adafruit marks it up, not to "prey on well meaning but clueless electronics hobbyists" but to cover the costs of doing business, like any retailer. These costs include shipping-from-wholesaler, warehousing, preparing when the item purchased is not in the final sellable state, adding photos and copy to website, adding educational resources, etc etc. Some of the costs are one-time costs and some are ongoing costs or recurring costs. Running a retail business isn't cheap, especially in the US. Note that LOAMLIN and Xnbada (the two "companies" behind the links you provided) have zero web presence beyond storefronts on Amazon and/or Aliexpress. I can't even tell you where they're shipping from (though it's highly likely it's China or somewhere else where labor is very cheap), let alone who owns/runs them. There's no accountability whatsoever besides the comments on their listings, which doesn't mean much these days. There's no product support besides _maybe_ being able to return (to China?) for a refund. If you're OK with all of that, then yes, buying from them makes more sense for you. But that still doesn't mean that Adafruit is price gouging.