Ten years of cheap electronics, and a new €3 charge that quietly makes the whole habit pointless.
I’ve been buying from AliExpress since November 2015. My first order, for the record, was a €1 bag of replacement screws for a MacBook — the sort of thing no shop near me stocks and no sane person pays shipping for. That pretty much set the tone for the next decade.
I pulled my whole account history the other day and counted 322 orders. Just under €5,000 over ten years, which sounds like a lot until you look at what it actually was: jumper wires, GPIO headers for a Raspberry Pi, solder, a handful of sensor boards, plastic sleeves for my game cartridges, little displays you genuinely can’t buy here in the Netherlands without paying three times the price. Supplies, basically — the raw material for a hundred small weekend projects. There were a couple of real splurges buried in there too — a brand-new iPhone, the odd used MacBook SSD — but mostly it’s a long, boring list of things that cost a euro or two.
For all that it comes to ten years and nearly €5,000, the median order was about €5. Almost half of everything came in under that, fifty-odd orders were under €2, and the cheapest was a literal one cent. The most expensive single thing in a decade was that new iPhone, at €499 — the exception that proves how small the rest of it is. That’s the shape of it: a steady drip of tiny parcels, around thirty a year, with the occasional proper purchase thrown in.
On 1 July 2026 the EU changes the rules in a way that makes that kind of shopping stop adding up. So I’m winding the account down. Here’s the thinking.
