Do It Yourself

the frame is usually the most expensive part by a lot. if you go to any western optician chain (and many people don't have access to anything but chain stores), you are getting your glasses from luxottica. they own basically all brands of frames and have made it their business to upsell frames as much as possible.

there is an old youtube video by the channel How To Make Everything that is worth watching about making your own glasses. the gimmick of the channel used to be that they would tally up the cost of producing, processing and shipping the raw material for everyday things to demonstrate the economy of scale, so they made a $600 BLT sandwich, an $8000 three-piece suit, and more things like that by producing everything themselves on the sites that the raw materials exist. but when they made eyeglasses, the cost for a new pair of glasses came out to basically the same as their homemade ones, partly due to the fact the materials involved in making glass and basic wood frames exists basically everywhere, but mostly due to the absolutely insane markup on frames by the single company that makes most of them.