Do you think it's time to wait for prices to drop?

[josuah]

You can have a script to watch the site and tell you once the part is in stock, then be able to buy within minutes (eg distill).
If you are really dedicated, have a purchase script too, but, that can be risky.

When I needed to automate something involving purchasing, what I was doing is automating the addition of items to the "cart" (as web thing seems to use these days), and let me trigger the purchase manually.

That way, no need to add all items one by one to the cart, and you can just confirm the order of everything at once, without automated payment leaking your bank account due to a bug.

[IOsetting]

The price of M0 and M3 variants are dropping dramatically. In November the price of a M0 chip with 64k flash + 8k ram has dropped to 1 RMB(0.15 USD) in China Mainland, and M3 (stm32f103 variants with 64K flash + 20K ram) dropped below 5 RMB(0.75USD).
The price depends on whether there is a alternative manufactured in China, Taiwan or Korea. If yes, you should wait, the price will drop, and the clones prices will soon become totally unprofitable. If not, the price will remain high and you should take action, for all the uncertainty will increase the shortage.

[luiHS]

The price of M0 and M3 variants are dropping dramatically. In November the price of a M0 chip with 64k flash + 8k ram has dropped to 1 RMB(0.15 USD) in China Mainland, and M3 (stm32f103 variants with 64K flash + 20K ram) dropped below 5 RMB(0.75USD).
The price depends on whether there is a alternative manufactured in China, Taiwan or Korea. If yes, you should wait, the price will drop, and the clones prices will soon become totally unprofitable. If not, the price will remain high and you should take action, for all the uncertainty will increase the shortage.

I wish the same thing happened with the Cortex M7, but it is not. Everything sold out and prices have doubled in the best of cases, and this is at prices from official distributors such as Mouser or Digikey, if you ask Chinese distributors they give you exorbitant prices and they are surely used products that may or may not work, rebranded or fakes.

[peter-h]

Perhaps these speculators have built the equivalent of esnipe.com - I use that on ebay auctions, universally - and monitor a specific site and then just buy the stock.

The distis must love this. It is wonderful - until it all crashes.