I used to buy them cheap in AliExpress, but since the new european tariff it’s ridiculously expensive, you’ll pay dozens of times the prize of the product in tariffs.
Amazon and other big general retailers are ridiculously expensive as well.
Local buying is not an option because in my city there is not a single electronics shop.
Buying from small specialized online shops, the best option if it were not for the lack of selection, meaning that to order all you need for a project need to hit several shops and be buried in shipping cost.
What do you hobbyists do since ali is not an option anymore within the EU?
Why not? To my knowledge, the 3€ surcharge is applied by category, not item. So, if you’re buying electronic components, you pay 3€, once.
I’m not a hobbyist but in Portugal Robert Mauser is a big player. Then there are the specialty shops, as you mention.
That doesn’t seem to be how it’s been implemented, at least going by the AliExpress subreddit.
Sadly the “categorie” thing is somehow misleading.
There are not a few dozen categories. There are thousands if not millions of categories. And electronics is surely not one category.
I think categories are defined by a 6 digits code in the tariff print, or something like that. And they are very granulated.
At the end, unless you are buying several of the same product you end up paying 3€ per product.