First of all, thanks for such a GREAT model Anio/Polo. Purchased plans earlier this week, and just finished part order.
I'm in the USA and there HAS to be a better (cheaper) way to build this without the spendy "magnets", but I'm working through that. I have purchased all parts (with some of the minor substitutions already listed throughout this thread, like black handle on rather than light bley)...
Anyway, my price for everything except the spendy magnet holders on bottom was just under $900 (not counting S&H) from 19 vendors at roughly $0.15 cpp...S&H was just under $90.
Couple of the most EXPENSIVE things (from overall model cost) out side of the magnets are as follows:
#3703 - Technic, Brick 1x16 (interior frame as well as the blacks for the stand). Doing a careful check on colors for "interior" frame and finding those as cheap as possible helps. Find as many of these cheap first and supplement from those.
#3460 - Plate 1x8 - mostly is the Dark Red, but don't under estimate the counts of light bley.
#3027 - Plate 6x16 - find a cheap source of light bley (Pick-a-Brick is only 2.10).
#2445 - Plate 2x12 - Just a lot of these...find a CHEAP source.
#4282 - Plate 2x16 - I'm really disappointed the builder used so many of these needlessly (structurally). Sure, they are nice, but pretty spendy at 10x the cost of 2x8.
#3456 - Plate 6x14.
#2465 - Brick 1x16
#6190 - Don't under estimate the cost of the Radio Handle detail part.
Anyway, just some of my findings, and that is separating the list into "rare" wanted as well as "bulk" list with HALF the min qty to help match at fewer stores and pricing. I sure wish all the pricing was open SQL and I would write a recursive perl to get more optimized on minimum pricing.
Jeff
