I've had very good luck ordering from Zenni and Coastal. It is perhaps a bit harder to find a frame style you like, but once you have a frame of reference for say width measurements it's not so bad.

They're especially good for cheap prescription sun glasses. I bought a whole stack of them years ago I'm still working through. If I go to the river or where ever and something happens to them I'm out $25 instead of $250.

It also helped that the last time I went to a local shop it proved to be a ridiculous experience. I ordered a pair of clear acrylic frames, and for whatever reason when they came in the sales clerk got bored and thought it'd be interesting to use highlighter on the insides of the frame to see what it looked like. But then it wouldn't come off so she just kinda tried to play it off like nothing happened when I picked them up. It was completely absurd. I had to wait another month for them to reorder.

So yeah, eyeglasses are now one of those categories of local businesses where I've learned they're basically all scams.

Related: it's getting hard to find a cleaner that does alterations in house vs mailing them off to a service. Last couple times I've had to do that it turns into a 4 to 6 week long game of "where did your clothing disappear to and will the store find it this time or tell you to come back in a week yet again."

Why is it so many of these simple services increasingly feel like total scams in the US?

> I don't think that I'd ever pay more than $100 for a frame again.

$100 sounds like it's ~10x what the price should actually be for simple plastic shapes, and it's probably more than 100x the actual cost to manufacture them.

Indeed. I buy 5 pairs of glasses at a time (cheapest ones I can manage which look OK). 5 at a time is still cheaper than 1/3rd the price of low cost normal glasses.

And each of those 5 pairs is half as durable.

It is a similarly wild situation where eye exams at Walmart can be cheaper than at a regular eye doctor covered by my insurance.

Zenni is a good choice _if you know your PD_ (pupillary distance) - the distance from nose to center of pupil. 1 mm off will turn your glasses into headache machines. And the phone apps that purport to measure this are universally bad. Get it professionally done at a place that will give you the value. Costco will do so.

If you don't want to purchase online Costco is decent price - $180ish for the progressives lenses I just purchased vs $400+ from LensCrafters. Downside of Costco is a limited selection of frames, but worth a look. Also heard good things about Warby Parker but have not purchased lenses from them.

Oh, Zenni's progressive lenses have a much narrower distance vision section in the lens than Costco's. So I get progressive glasses at Costco then single reading and computer glasses (for < $40 each) at Zenni.

How does buying glasses online even work? I have never tried, so I'd expect it to be like buying shoes without trying them on (which I won't do either, based on in-store experience I'd be returning 9 pairs out of 10 for bad fit).

I wear glasses for 95% of time, I want to not hate how they feel.

My friend has purchased several pairs from Zenni but the frames kept cracking around the lens even though she only wears them for a couple of hours each day. They'd send her a new frame and it would do the same after a month or two. She didnt really like the metal frames they offered so kept choosing plastic frames. Finally she got fed up with Zenni and purchased slightly more expensive glasses from Warby Parker and has had zero issues since. It definitely feels like a "you get what you paid for" type of story here. Zenni is much cheaper than buying frames from Luxottica but there's definitely some happy medium where you aren't overpaying for glasses but still buying something of comparable quality to the overpriced brands. She used to get Ray-Ban frames while on her parent's insurance but when she got her own, she could get a free years supply of contacts or Luxottica-priced pair of glasses. So now she gets her big supply of contacts from a retailer using insurance and buys a new pair of Warby Parker glasses using HSA money.

For Europe, Ace & Tate [1] are affordable and pretty good quality. Frame + lens go for €110, or €120 to include blue light filter coating.

Frankly, unless we're talking about real designer pieces, glasses have been a completely utilitarian/commodity item for the past half century. The real achievement of Luxottica (which also reflects in their brand name) is that they still manage to sell them as premium/craft products.

[1] https://www.aceandtate.com/

You can buy frames with glasses in India for less than Rs.800 (less than $10)

I paid $11 (shipped) for a pair of glasses from them for use in VR. I didn’t want to screw up my normal glasses. For eleven bucks they aren’t bad at all. Not my style. And I didn’t get any coating so the reflections are bad but man, I can’t see for shit without glasses and I’m happy that if I even fall on hard times I can at least pay for a new pair of glasses.

I definitely think it's cool that they have some pretty freaking cheap frames. That said, I didn't pay more than $100 for my frame.

They didn't have that many $100+ glasses at the store. I think the frames that I bought for like $60 (didn't even hit the max, so they were free). Honestly, think they're nicer than most of the frames there.

You can buy oakleys for like $40-70. Even the sale ones tend to look better than the ones on zenni. Some of the nicer zenni's are $40+ anyway.

Of course it is really cool to see decent frames for $20 or less. I'm going to keep it in mind in the future.

Zenni is a Chinese company that wouldn’t ship to Lithuania presumably because of Taiwan situation. I’ve got new sunnies from them just few days ago, but still super wary. There must be better.

They charge $167 for my transition lenses, last time I got them locally I paid 262€. Per lens O.o I guess I’ll try them.

Damn I bought mine for ₹ 5000 (~$60) and I think I overpaid.

Is that the same co as eyebuydirect.com? That’s who I’ve used

Another great site is goggles4u.com