trade you can find a lot of cheap path of exile items

Definitely. As someone who has avoided standard for quite some time and only played temp leagues: I was baffled by the prices when I played standard last week. If you use poe. trade you can find a lot of cheap items, but most of them are inactive users (not saying they quit, but often stopped playing for weeks).

If you're trying to buy stuff from online players like in challenge leagues you're going to pay exorbitant prices for average rares (the worst thing are gems. People want EXALTS for ~level 15-17 gems).

I assume the post I made sounds worse than I intended it to sound.

I wanted to try several CoC setups because I never played them, so I tried to buy level 15+ Arc/Ice Spear/Cold Snap/some other gems. While in general there are many people selling them for ~1 chaos, most of them were not online (and often offline for way more than one day). When I searched for them I was unable to find Ice Spear/Cold Snap for <1 exalt from someone that is currently online, searching for several hours while playing.

I just redid my search and the cheapest level 15+ Cold Snap that is currently online was listed for 5 chaos, with a total of 7 gems <1 exalt (to be fair, the rest are mostly 20Q gems, but that wasn't the case the last time I searched. Arctic Breath shows similar results).

When you actually take your time and search stuff over some time/PM a lot of offline traders you probably could get them cheaper, but when you're trying to trade instantly like in challenge leagues/the 1 month league it appears to me to be a lot more expensive