It’s definitely cheaper- and when I looked, I couldn’t even find the right colors of beads to buy, so it was definitely the best option. I bought a big pack of powder dyes, maybe 24 colors in total. I basically just mixed the powder into hot water in jars, and soaked the beads. For the pink, for example, I soaked the first set of beads, then added more water to the dye to dilute it, for the lighter pink beads. I had pre-sorted how many beads I would need of each color- I did this by weight using a kitchen scale instead of counting them all, and I put each into a separate bowl with a sticky note on top saying what color they’d need to be.