For small personal projects I have switched to LCSC in part because I can automate the BOM order when I generate the PCB gerbers all out of Kicad via gitlab pipeline. All I have to do is add the LCSC part numbers as an extra field in my Kicad schematic. If I order from JLCPCB I also get a shipping discount at LCSC.
Mauser and digitkey are very expensive to ship here (Switzerland) so unless my order is larger it's not worth it for small project that don't need any guarantee on where the part came from.
It may not affect the economics of your situation, but if you do projects on a regular basis, this might help.
When I order parts for a project, my baseline rule is "order 3: one to break, one to use, one to kick around in your parts drawer for next time". Then I go back through my order and increase quantities of parts I know that I'll be needing again for future projects until the order total is high enough to qualify for discounts on shipping.
That's a good pro-tip, but the real pros order 10 of something they think will be useful in the future, and then let it sit in their parts collection for 80 years until they die.
> then let it sit in their parts collection for 80 years until they die.
Heh. I'm halfway there. I have parts in my bins that I bought 40 years ago. I even recently discovered I have an old 8085A microprocessor from the 80s left over from the first computer I built.
Digikey doesn't give a shit about interfacing with a hobbyist tool. There's no money in it. They'd much rather spend the resources on developing interfaces for their customers that spend 100-1000x more money with them.
Digikey has been pretty active on Twitter lately, targeting hobbyists. They're also a platinum level KiCAD sponsor. And they bought the kicad.org domain from a malware squatter and donated it to the KiCAD project.
I've been building some prototype boards for work with JLCPCB recently. There used to be an option to bundle parts from LCSC but that kind of went away. However, if you have a PCB order open you can get super cheap shipping if logged into the same account on LCSC.
I've been using JLCPCB's Global Sourcing service a lot recently. I can get DigiKey/Mouser parts sent to JLCPCB's inventory for assembly. The shipping is a bit slow but it beats having to manually assemble a few components not available at JLCPCB.
I am using kicad 7 but with kibot. I will post the pipeline tomorrow here as another comment as I can't do it via mobile.
Edit: I will probably do a complete write up on my blog as I changed a few things between 6 and 7. Should be posting it within a week at https://sschueller.github.io/
Mauser and digitkey are very expensive to ship here (Switzerland) so unless my order is larger it's not worth it for small project that don't need any guarantee on where the part came from.