So I have “new” bike (subjectively) about 9 months. And I spent about 2000 € on it (bike, and some accessories - rack, bags…) and I can tell that it is lot of bike for not that much money.
So now when I look back I can’t see it as “expensive” bike, just as reasonably priced for its purpose. I use it every day to commute and as bikepacking/touring bike so now it has ~6000 km.
So how much are you willing to spend on bike?
Edit: So I read your comments and I probably need to clarify little bit.
- I use the bike for everything instead of car so even nicer more expensive bike for me is justifiable.
- I also think that the bike industry is bonkers right now about shiny new expensive things.
- For me there is few types of riders and all parties try to upsell them some shit, there aren’t any 500€ bike with flat bars and rigid fork where I am. All of the bikes at this price point have shitty suntour fork, bad saddle, useless pedals and shitty tires. From my perspective they are expensive on the parts that don’t matter and cheap out on stuff that matters. If someone sell something like that (flat bar gravel with quality parts where it matters) it would be gamechanger.
- I had to build my bike, nothing like that (full steel gravel/bikepacking/do it all bike) wasn’t on the market/second hand market. It add to the price a bit. And it was about month before the prices get down to reasonable levels after pandemic.
I dont know but i feel like there might be very drastic price differences between countries/continents.
If i wanted a high end bike, i would buy a used one for like 1000€. Often you can get 4k€ bikes for a fraction of the price.
For a city bike that rarely goes more than 10km at once, paying more than 600€ is probably a waste of money.
But yeah if you do lots of tours, a 1500-2000€ bike is gonna be more enjoyable but anything beyond that seems overkill unless you are doing competetive sports.
Yeah I think that I spend the upper limit, after that you get diminishing returns - few grams here and there nothing more.
Because most things in the bike world are nicely standardized you can really save a lot with used bikes tho. Often bikes with “broken” parts cost much less and with an afternoon and a lil bit of money for replacement parts you can get something much nicer than your budget might allow for.