being somewhat new to all of these and having made about 10 bikes with products from both HJ and Nova, I am starting to digest the prices. Actually, that isn't true. As I am very familiar with buy metal locally, the prices arent bad at all. But the shipping, and this falls under demand as do the prices, for canadians, is hard to swallow. I have paid nearly 50$ on a 200$ order, you bend a stay wrong or whatever, and your build just jumped another 50 bucks to get a set of stays and shipped. This is where it gets really painful for the small time builders, because I am not going to order 2 or 3 more frame sets in a guessing game of what will come next. That said, at my amount of building, it is called a hobby, and hobbies are expensive. Same thing with paint. i buy a quart of clear with activator and it sets me back 50$. I buy a gallon of clear/activator (enough for roughly 50 frames), and im spending 65$. My point it isn't so much the cost of materials as it is a lot of other stuff, im sure the cans paint come in are damn near as costly for the manufacturers as is the product.

Throw out the mass produced notions of nominal value, realize what materials are going to cost, get a bit of perspective from this and help that in making something beautiful for the world by making a real bike.