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Lego price per part over the years
- zitterbewegung 3y agoThis doesn’t take into account for the large amount of parts you can get from eBay .
- jbentleylong 3y agoReminds me how much I love the Power Miners sets -- hate to see the prices, though
- bombcar 3y ago> Many people quote that a set should be priced at around $0.10 per part to be worthwhile. Is this the average? This has been the average, and it's so "perfect" that it has to be that Lego has been aiming for it. They've accomplished this by having more and more detail (read: smaller pieces) in newer sets. They appear to have been forced (or trying) to jump to $0.20 per piece in some sets (e.g., https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/cinderella-and-prince-charming-s-castle-43206 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/cinderella-and-prince-cha... )
- bleepblop 3y agoI have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set. I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add insult to injury; I have noticed their quality control slipping over the years. For example: in the past 40 years or so, I might get a kit with a piece missing once a decade? Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing. As a long time lego enthusiast; they have been slowly losing my trust.
- breuleux 3y agoHow many sets do you buy per year, out of curiosity? I got into Lego during the pandemic and bought around 50 sets in the past three years. Over that sample, the number of missing pieces was precisely zero.
- bleepblop 3y agoI go on some wild stints. But if I had to average it out; somewhere around 10-20 kits a year.
- Larrikin 3y agoMy experience is in fact the opposite. I usually buy the larger sets, and have nearly always had left over smaller pieces. It made me worried the first time it happened and I spent the time tracing back through the model only to find I didn't miss anything.
- bleepblop 3y agoI wish I could say the same. The extra little guys is to be expected. I am talking about key pieces to the puzzle.
- jacurtis 3y agoThey do precise weighing of bags as a quality control measure. The tiny 1x1 type pieces are more likely to get missed by the weighing so they often add an extra of those pieces to offset a potential loss that might not get noticed when weighing them. That is why you always get two helmet visors for example when you buy a speed champion. The machine is actually just designed to give you two, because that way if it breaks and misses one, you still have one that you need and it costs them almost nothing to do that. But a missing helmet visor is easy to get missed by the quality control scale. So if you ever buy a speed champion and only get one helmet visor, it is because you lost one or the machine broke. But that's why there's an extra. They do that by design. That's just one example. You see it with magic wands in Harry Potter sets, you always get two, and a lot of sets with 1x1 pieces will always have 1-2 extras just because they are cheap to add in and more likely to get missed in their QA process which weighs the bags.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoYeah, but Lego inflates its part counts with lots of smaller pieces now. The licensed sets are also a big hit. The best sets Lego makes are the creator ones, some of them I've bought multiple of so my kid could have the alt builds at the same time.
- jojobas 3y agoSo it should be price per 100g or something unless you want these 5mm parts, or some blend of price per piece and price and weight.
- dunham 3y agoIt looks like the new D&D set is about $0.10 per piece, including licensing, but it's 3745 pieces so there is economy of scale. The set you link is much smaller and has Disney licensing, which I suspect is of the "how much money do you have?" variety.
- aidenn0 3y agoBe interesting to see median or quartiles instead of just average; licensed sets probably skew the average up.
- bombcar 3y agoI'd like to see it per pound. I suspect (based on my feelings) that licensing is less per set than you might think, and that the price per pound has been trending up as piece size trends down.
- NickNameNick 3y agoI'd expect 2 small pieces to weigh more than 1 big one. So I'd expect you to see the weight go up faster than the part count. Not sure if that would confound or exagerate the trend.
- bombcar 3y agoThey’re not replacing a 1x4 with 2 1x2s, they’re just designing sets with more pieces per pound (by having smaller pieces for decoration).
- bena 3y agoAnother factor is that Lego is using more greebling than in the past. So you have more "parts", but they're all small pieces used for detailing rather than larger structural components of the build.
- yalok 3y agoexactly, that's been my concern as well - more and more parts now are very specialized and hard to reuse in other projects. Makes me sad for the kids - this limits creativity...
- Jean-Philipe 3y agoWell, yes and no. Look at the Ninjago City sets where the designers have used special parts in very creative ways! Otherwise, I too prefer sets without special parts. The Minecraft and Creator series are excellent for that.
- chomp 3y agoThere’s actually less specialized parts these days, that’s what put Lego in trouble in the 90s, I think what GP commenter was referring to is a ton of the studs and cylinders and 1x1 diagonal parts that Lego includes, that are “fluff”. These parts are extremely cheap to produce, so you may have data that looks like price per part is flat, but in reality that’s because more of your sets are now from cheaper detailing parts.
- jerrysievert 3y agohaving collected through the 90's, I can attest that there are a lot less specialty parts now, but in recent sets that number appears to be growing again. almost every fairly large set I've purchased in the last 2 years have had 10-12 new-to-me parts in it, and the other sets continue to include those same parts as well. mostly, they've been pieces to make some change for SNOT, but there seem to be so many of them now that it feels like we're going back to that 90's mentality. some of those sets: * batman shadow box (with my first ever missing piece!) * dune ornithopter (great build) * loop rollercoaster (not counting those loop tracks) * orient express (my least favorite build in the last few years)
- SushiHippie 3y agoWould also be interesting to see how zhe PPP changes with the amount of pieces in a set. i.e. if small sets with a tiny piece count have a higher PPP than larger sets with hundreds of pieces.
- dhosek 3y agoAt a rough glance, that does appear to be the case.
- hermitcrab 3y agoTop tip. Buy used Lego cheap from ebay (or similar) and stick it in the dishwasher in a string bag. Try to avoid Lego from a smoker's house or that has been heavily gnawed. And keep the dishwasher heat low, unless you want Salvador Dali Lego.
- bombcar 3y agoHotter tip - if you live near a Goodwill auction site, you can pickup "in store" and so you can bid for their bulk Lego without shipping.
- prawn 3y agoIn case you never read this at the time - he's talked about it on HN a few times: Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/
- JKCalhoun 3y agoThe Persistence of Playtime
- makeitdouble 3y agoAnother tip: the quality difference between a Lego brand piece and its doppleganger from an AliExpress shop exists, but is usually negligible. I never saw a piece that doesn't fit, and the difference was mostly color and durability, where the no-brand technic bricks would fail earlier than the Lego ones when (ab)used for mechanically straining purposes, like a coat hangers, cup holder etc. The more interesting part: this opens up access to more original and specialized parts that Lego doesn't want or cares about, like a go pro mount for instance.
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoHow about regulations on plasticizers and chemicals that your kids will put in their mouth ? Or the environmental impact, for which an EU company will care much more and be regulated for ?
- boplicity 3y agoLego is a plastics company; they're trying to become net-zero, but, unfortunately, being a plastics company, this is extremely hard: https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b7dc https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b...
- elzbardico 3y agoWhy? As long as people don't burn the bricks....
- donkeyboy 3y agoPlastic is made from upstream oil and gas companies. Kind of hard to be net-zero in that sector
- lupire 3y agoWhy? It's effectively a recycling progrsm for waste.
- boplicity 3y agoThe creation of plastic products causes significant emissions, which is something that I don't think is widely understood.
- magnetowasright 3y agoft link: https://archive.is/20230924232054/https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b7dc https://archive.is/20230924232054/https://www.ft.com/content...
- magnetowasright 3y ago> The world’s largest toymaker announced two years ago that it had tested a prototype brick made of recycled plastic bottles rather than oil-based ABS, currently used in about 80 per cent of the billions of pieces it makes each year. However, Niels Christiansen, chief executive of the family-owned Danish group, told the Financial Times that using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime as it would have required new equipment. I just thought that particular issue around new equipment was interesting.
- amelius 3y agoDon't kids want 3d-printers these days?
- Arrath 3y agoSure, but if they're anything like my friend's kid they're not really computer-savvy, just reasonably proficient at driving apps. Thus, when he plugged in his 3d printer and was confronted with some driver or configuration problems he threw his hands up, said it was junk, and went back to roblox. Trying not to sound too much like a 'kids these days!' rant, but that is what happened (yes, in this one anecdotal case). I think we're doing everyone a disservice by abstracting away all the underlying layers to the point that people don't have to interact with the filesystem, but that's a whole different subject.
- gmueckl 3y agoOne thing that is not captured accurately in a simple price over parts count computation is the fact that parts complexity is wildly different between shapes. There's a huge difference between a 1x1 plate and a Technic baseplate with holes pointing in every direction, to pick extreme examples. I believe that even factoring in the extra handling costs and margins, the prices on Pick a Brick give a decent approximation of the actual price span (<$0.10 to >$2.00 per piece).
- sxp 3y agoIs it just me or does the data aspect of the site feel horribly designed? E.g, the main graph is hard to read since most of the data points are in the $0.10/part range but the graph's y-axis is overwhelmed by the right side with it's $3.11/part train set. And if I click on that, https://brickinsights.com/sets/categories/26 https://brickinsights.com/sets/categories/26 shows 4 data points and it's overwhelmed by a single outlier from 1991. And the time-sequence chart near the bottom uses a line graph rather than a scatterplot which overwhelms the useful data. A better graph would be a time-sequence scatterplot of price/part on a log scale like https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5oanki/lego_set_price_as_a_function_of_the_number_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5oanki/leg...
- oofbey 3y agoOf course very few people are experts in visual display of data, but this one is so horribly bad. Log scale please? The title of the post should be a simple chart, and there are charts on the page, but it's completely impossible to get the useful data out of the charts. Sheesh.
- rylittle 3y agoYou can turn off some of the series to make it easier to read.
- ryukoposting 3y agoI made a script last year that scraped LEGO pricing data from their website. Besides finding out that the Bugatti Bolide Technic set is a pretty good deal as a parts bag, I found that there's only a weak correlation between set size and PPP. The Dots sets throw a wrench in things, of course, and large Technic sets often have expensive electronic and pneumatic parts that must be considered. My conclusion was that PPP is useful as a bargain-hunting tool, but not as a model for broad price analysis. Here's that for anyone interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1328f52/detailed_lego_priceperpiece_analysis_now_with/ https://old.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1328f52/detailed_lego...
- bombcar 3y agoJust like the article, you really have to correct for outliers to make PPP work. It's more of a "rule of thumb" that you can use to determine if something is, as you said, a bargain worth getting even if it is outside your main area. Bricklink's "part out" tool is more accurate, but some pieces get priced "wrong" and you have to know enough to determine that.
- samstave 3y agoEpic! thank you! I loved going to Valley Faire Mall in San Jose and scooping parts by the pound. I didnt see any of the lego store by-the-pound model. An interesting method for sus-ing up what parts they had would be looking into the shipments to-from lego entities in NL and USA - sea shipping bills of lading can be found on import yeti (now obviously unless someone has digitized historic bills of lading, etc (and we all know that ship hands (pirates) and long-shoremen (mob) have famously been the definition of corruption - so we can hardly ever trust any bill of lading... So with that in mind though: Lets look at the shipments of LEGO https://i.imgur.com/HgLlBuF.png https://i.imgur.com/HgLlBuF.png Nathan appears to be a top importer of Lego https://i.imgur.com/xYDvko5.png https://i.imgur.com/xYDvko5.png Ships mostly a container a month to LA. https://i.imgur.com/7ZALaMi.png https://i.imgur.com/7ZALaMi.png LegoLand is his customer: https://i.imgur.com/I0oS1wu.png https://i.imgur.com/I0oS1wu.png -- But I cant find out contents of shipment .... AH Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/7CjqVBW.png https://i.imgur.com/7CjqVBW.png So you can see that they are ~1,000 lbs per shipment... rounding up - then remove ~30% for weight of packaging and basically you have 750 pounds of plastic bricks - then apply part existance probability and you can see how much of each part is being imported and a costing idea... We could probably map out all lego sets and shipments with some dilligence. Should also look at the environmental impact of lego long term. its a LOT of plastic.
- deadbabe 3y agoSomeone should figure out how to quantify how “creative potential” a piece has so you can measure how reusable pieces in a set will be for building unique things.
- bombcar 3y agoI suspect you could do something quick and dirty with "connectors" - a 1x1 brick would have two connectors, a 2x4 brick would have 16. Apply some form of modulo by piece count (8 1x1 bricks are more "creative" than a single 2x4) and you'd be close.
- deadbabe 3y agoI suspect you’re right, and would like to add that perhaps the physical weight of the piece may also provide some insight. Small light weight pieces with many connectors likely have large amounts of use cases. Big pieces with small amounts probably not as much. The axis upon which connections attach to may be another important variable.
- fuzzy_biscuit 3y agoI love the idea, but the year axis starting so early makes the days more difficult to read, esp. on mobile.
- Triphibian 3y agoI didn't see any mention in the cost of licensing impacting the price of sets. That's a huge factor. Kits from Lego's own IP such as Ninjago, etc can offer a better PPP value because they aren't cutting in Disney or some other media brand.
- shmeeed 3y agoThis. We know for a fact that there's a huge gap in PPP between licensed and unlicensed sets. Unfortunately, without this distinction, the data is basically worthless.
- ragazzina 3y ago> Observation 4: Licensed IP isn't always expensive... > Piece count and part size have a much larger effect on PPP than licensing royalties. There isn't a huge difference between licensed themes and Lego's own internal themes. This makes a bit of sense- Lego is big enough that their own IP can command markups on a similar level as big-name entertainment franchises. Ninjago and minifigs are great examples of this. > Observation 5: ...except for Star Wars > Despite averaging over 1000 pieces, Star Wars sets rank near the bottom in PPP. Every theme below Star Wars features low piece counts and/or lots of electronics. Long-time Lego people already knew the Star Wars sets had a heavy markup, but it's interesting to see how Star Wars compares to another Lucasfilm franchise, Indiana Jones. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39760878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39760878
- pubby 3y agoAs a kid I did the math on all the lego sets, and came to the conclusion that the 500 piece bucket was the best bargain, beating out the 1000 piece bucket by a decent amount. Most other sets were an awful value in comparison. As an adult, I realized buying new was idiotic when I could just buy used. I ended up buying a former lego employee's collection for $60, selling the monorail it contained for $1000, and keeping the massive washing-machine sized rest for myself. Too bad deals like that come once in a lifetime!
- oofbey 3y agoI'd love to see a chart of lego part prices over the years. Instead, what I saw was a couple charts showing only the outliers of the most-expensive parts over the years. Data visualization fail.
- kromem 3y agoWhat happened in 2010? Spike in both system and electronics.
- Leader2light 3y ago[dead]
- bhouston 3y agoYou can buy bulk lego compatible parts from AliExpress that are basically identical to real lego pieces.
- ivanech 3y ago5 years ago I did a similar analysis of price per part because I remember there being a big controversy around the price of the new Star Destroyer set. I analyzed price per piece but also price per gram, estimated in a few different ways. I was surprised to see that price per gram was stable through the 2010s on an inflation-adjusted basis and that it went down fairly significantly over the 1990s. I did this before I learned how to finish projects, so it's been sitting in a private repo the whole time :) I just made the repo public. Perhaps the author or someone else can make use of it: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/ https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/ The plots and code are in this file: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/blob/master/clean-plots.ipynb https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/blob/mast...
- NilsIRL 3y ago> I did this before I learned how to finish projects Very curious about this. As do many people I struggle to finish projects. How does one learn this skill?
- Moru 3y ago1. Pick something small that you know you can finish. 2. Finish it. 3. Feel the rush of actually finish something! 4. Repeat. Ok, not that easy but that is how I got around to it eventually.
- parentheses 3y agoThe higher PPP is well explained by the fact that the actual blocks are bigger. Plus, younger age targeted sets have more figurines and less small pieces. For example, the duplo train set I bought for my daughter has several very large train car bases.
- coin 3y agoThat is one slow chart
- seanvelasco 3y agoWhat happened with Legos? They used to be simple. Harry Potter Legos, Star Wars Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I’m not saying it's bad. I just wanna know what happened.
- crooked-v 3y agoExtremely profitable licensing happened. They're much better these days at making everything reusable than they used to be, though, and it's rare for anything beyond prints/stickers to be set-specific. Even prop pieces like Harry Potter wands or Star Wars blasters regularly get reused in unrelated sets as part of the bric-a-brac.
- micheljansen 3y agoTheir patents have expired, so now anyone can make the simple kits and compete with LEGO. LEGO avoided this by building lots of exclusive IP partnerships: https://iposinternational.com/resources/articles/the-building-blocks-of-the-lego-groups-ip-strategy_126 https://iposinternational.com/resources/articles/the-buildin...
- j45 3y agoBrand partnerships are a part price multiplier
- dna_polymerase 3y agoThe first data point in the time series seems to be from 1991, yet the x-Axis starts at 1949. Why? I'd have a better overview of the price changes if the actual data had more space.
- smashmiek 3y agoI can’t read your chart labels. There’s not enough contrast.
- noneeeed 3y agoI wonder how much the trend towards smaller pieces has affected this. There seem to be many more very small detail pieces in the kits now, which makes for lovely detailed models, but increases the part count without increasing the size noticably. One of my frustrations with trying to get my kids into lego is the proliferation in these one and two stud pieces in relatively small kits that are otherwise perfect for kids. Those tiny pieces can be pretty hard for smaller children to put in place properly, and make the build instructions harder for them to follow on their own. They result in higher detailed models at the end of it, but both my kids found them very frustrating when they were smaller.
- bluetomcat 3y ago> One of my frustrations with trying to get my kids into lego is the proliferation in these one and two stud pieces in relatively small kits that are otherwise perfect for kids. With my 5-year-old, we keep groups of sets in separate stackable plastic boxes. In one plastic box, we have only City vehicles (vans, tractors, cars, SUVs) which are mostly in an assembled state. He would play with them on the ground and would occasionally want to disassemble one. He then builds his own wacky wheeled creation, pridefully shows it to me and then asks "daddy, can you give me the instructions so we can build the original tractor again". We also have another box with mostly gray rectangular bricks from 31120 "Medieval Castle". We would both stand on the ground for hours, doing stuff like small towers, houses, or just wacky things resembling real-world objects he has seen.
- dan_hawkins 3y agoRegular LEGO sets are not intended for small kids, Duplo sets are. Every LEGO set comes with suggested age range or suggested minimum age on the box.
- systems 3y agothis is too complex , i just wanted the price per brick over the years like year -> price this is too enterprisy
- 31carmichael 3y agoI never understood Legos. For kids, they are quite expensive as a toy. For adults, why don't you build something actually useful. For example, learn to build electronics projects, or mechanically useful objects, or simple woodworking.