Best Value Products. How Much to Pay to Get the Most Bang for Your Buck?

I personally think this varies enormously. You can go too cheap for some products but other products its better spending less. I just wondered what people think is the best pricing for certain type of products. For example personally I think the cheapest baked beans are best. I see no difference to spending more.

For just a standard use bicycle (not performance) I would say somewhere around £300-500 is probably the best pricing for a solid reliable bike however for a performance road bike I'm thinking probably £800 is the minimum entry point and somewhere around £1000-1500 is optimal where spending more really achieves very little indeed. For TV's I think you can make the case the entry level models are a bit rough but that soon changes when you spend a little bit more. TV's however are something that there is tangible improvements as you go up the price scale, its hard to say a point when you shouldn't spend more until you get to the very esoteric high end brands like B&O.

Action cameras is another product that is pretty awful at entry level pricing perhaps £5-40 and not worth buying and above that you start getting ok performance for some models and then it scales all the way up to gopros that perform brilliantly but cost maybe £400 for the latest model. You can probably achieve close to gopro performance for around £200-250 and decent performance for around £100-150.

What is actually important though is your actual use. Not much point buying an expensive bicycle if its the first to be stolen outside the supermarket when you do your shopping because its the most valuable. Why buy an expensive and complicated super efficient hybrid car if you are a very low mileage driver and would be better served with a cheaper more reliable car that has poor mpg which could save you a lot of money. Why buy a performance road car when most of your driving is in urban traffic going from one set of traffic lights to the next?

I feel we can all make huge savings based on optimising our choices on what we buy, not being so brand focused or buying products without features we don't need. However we also may be too price focused. We may be buying products poorly made that will only last a short while but if we only paid 10% more we may have bought a product that would last 3x as long a huge saving. Stretching budgets and making good choices seems like something that is getting more and more important as we face greater levels of poverty.