To expand on your point: "Quantity has a quality all its own." — Stalin The point of cheap computing is ubiquitous computing. Doing things you couldn't seriou

To expand on your point: "Quantity has a quality all its own." — Stalin The point of cheap computing is ubiquitous computing. Doing things you couldn't seriously imagine previously because it would have felt like an "investment" and you would have psychologically needed a "return" on that investment, even if you intellectually understood that it was less than X cups of coffee or that you'd only be mildly peeved if you spent that much on a book which turned out to be a loser. This is related to threshold pricing: The fact that $20.00 looks different from $19.99, and that that kind of thing has an impact. However, this goes beyond just-under pricing; it extends to things which aren't blatant black-hat mind hacking tricks, into more benign territory where a $50.00 project just feels different from a $20.00 project, even if it involves the same amount of labor; the $50.00 project feels like "This is close to $100 of equipment. I need to make this count", but the $20.00 project feels like "This is one new book's worth of stuff. It might work, it might not. Worth a shot." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_price-point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_price-point http://www.frugalsolutions.org/Toolbox/Lower-price-threshold.aspx http://www.frugalsolutions.org/Toolbox/Lower-price-threshold... The final piece is what you mentioned: Scarcity makes things psychologically valuable. This is a well-known effect. If some piece of your build is rare, even if it was cheap, it still has a value which skews your willingness to use it. It's suddenly something which can't be "wasted". OTOH, if you know you could buy a dozen of them at any time and get them in a few days with the cheap shipping option, the psychological resistance to using them goes way down.