You can sometimes shop around. The chicken farmer that I used to see a lot sold her eggs for an incredible $4.50 a dozen. Other folks at the farmer's market were more like $3.50, and some of their eggs were superb. The food coop has them for $2.75 a dozen sometimes.

I recommend you try them once. That won't set you back all that much, and then you'll know if you've been missing something that's worth the extra money.

I wonder, how much do I spend on eggs? 6 months worth of grains for our chickens costs about $50. We also feed them kitchen scraps which would otherwise get thrown away, and that allows me to feed them less grain. A batch of new chickens and any new equipment we might need for the year might be around $50 as well. So maybe $150 per year, although I seem to spend less on them every year. Assuming a conservative average of 1 egg every 2 days per chicken, for 5 chickens, let's see... that's 76 dozen eggs a year, at a cost of $1.97 per dozen. Not as cheap as you might think, but totally worth it as far as I'm concerned.