Lenses are no longer custom high precision manufacturing... In fact a 50 cent laser pointer has far more far more precise lenses than a pair of glasses.

Lenses today tend to be polycarbonate plastic anyway - which means they can be produced rapidly like any other plastic moulding.

For a lot of people you can just take lenses from the production line and cut them to shape and be done but that is not always the case. Personally I always have to wait 2 to 3 weeks to get new glasses done as the lenses have to be made to spec and the lenses alone are around 350€ and no they are not any cheaper at any online retailer that operates here if they even offer to make lenses to my spec.

Methods for cheap fully custom made lenses are also coming to fruition.

Both SLA and FDM 3D printers are now able to make curved surfaces with 10's of micrometer precision across the lens surface, and local 10's of nanometer smoothness (usually via a surface-tension based smoothing process).

Usually you then use that as part of a two part mould to make the lens out of polycarbonate or some resin which has optical and hardness properties you want.

The whole lot, if done in ~10M quantities should come out to only 10 cents or so per piece (with each piece having a custom geometry).

There are really big opportunities available for doing this to contact lenses, since the lens can then fully compensate for any unevenness in the eye below, and could possibly lead to superhuman vision if done right. The same can't be done for glasses since the eyeball moves - instead the best you can do is a best-fit approximation for looking ahead.

Then you are an incredible outlier. The vast majority of folks that need glasses do not have this as the reason for the lenses being expensive. They're just being shafted.

Which country and what is special about your eyes or glasses?

I have noticed that in France glasses with decent but standard frames cost around 5 times as much as in the UK. My suspicion is that the difference is related to how supplementary health insurance works in France rather than any special manufacturing requirements.

Frames you can find for cheap if you look around a bit. The lenses cost a lot as I need massive amounts of prism (took me a bit of looking around to find an optometrist/eye doctor with equipment that could even measure it as it is outside of the range of normal measuring machines) on both to ensure that my eyes focus on the same point

The amount of prism is now to the point that adding more is not really possible and thus if it gets worse next step is surgery on the muscles controlling the eyes or intentionally letting one eye look away. Over time the brain starts to ignore the other eye for focused vision (it would still get used for peripheral vision)

But yeah without the prism the lenses are like 30€. Once you add prisms the lenses are around 350€.

I'm not the OP but I just got new glasses and they were ~$500. The frames were about $180 (one of the cheaper sets in the store and about $60 more than I paid 2 years ago; yay inflation). So the lens were around $300 and took 2 weeks to produce.

I have a severe case of Strabismus (Exotropia) and my left lens requires a prism in order to keep my eyes focused on the same target. The required prism has gotten strong over the years and as it has, the price of the prism has gone up as well. The prism alone added nearly $200 to my lens cost this time around.

All that said, I imagine the lack of competition (the thread topic) is at least partly to blame for this. I highly doubt my glasses cost anywhere near that much, even if they are special.

They explicitly said "more than $100 for a frame again."

Normally when you say "frames" you mean lenses excluded.

i work at Luxottica in a subsidiary that sells finished lenses to opticians or semifinished lenses to labs, cheap plastic lenses go for 0.15€/pcs, the expensive lenses range between 10-15€ each