I believe the prices are the same. But the app has a number of "games" to collect tokens that get credited as discounts. Seems to be mostly stuff designed to get you to open the app daily and browse their offers. Which might be "innocent" if it's just to get you to buy more stuff, or maybe they have more reasons they want you to have the app open. Who knows
At least Aliexpress doesn't have all the fake slot machine type games that temu has that always end in variations of "get $200 of discounts for your next order if you order x items from this list"
There are few things more scammy than AliExpress “discounts”. I have yet to see a cent of the hundreds of dollars of “savings” they gave or advertised to me.
They used to give 5-10 bucks of credit to new users a few years ago. Real credits, I very carefully compared prices from different IPs.
So I would register a new account for each order -- 10 USD is quite a lot of money in my country -- and saved at least a hundred on buying dev boards and other components.
Very true, I almost never use Ali Express because I have no clue what anything is going to cost until I get to roughly the final step of checking out.