[AlotOfReading]

Pantasy, Cobi, Funwhole, megabloks, etc. There's tons of alt bricks at nearly any reasonable price point. But you're still not going to find these sorts of multi-thousand piece sets for <$100 because it takes at least a few cents to produce a dimensionally accurate, quality controlled bit of plastic.

[zuzululu]

But thats because they limit production to control prices, producing mass volume accurate plastic was never the bottleneck.

[AlotOfReading]

These are remarkably close to the raw cost of materials and tooling. The Sagrada Familia model is a 12k piece set for $800, ~$0.07/piece. Phantasy has an unlicensed Opera set (85019) [0] with 3.5k pieces for $190, $0.05/piece. That's straight up cheap. They're not limiting production to control prices. High quality injection molding (in multiple colors no less!) is hard. 2 cents over 12k pieces does add up to a nice bit of change for Lego though.

[0] https://pantasy.com/products/pantasy-the-opera-85019