I’m planning on starting to grow my own cannabis indoors. I’ve got my eyes on an all-in-one kit that appears to have everything I need, minus pots, soil, seeds, nutrients & water.
Am I getting hosed on the price here? Could I save money by buying all of the component parts separately, perhaps at a brick & mortar indoor gardening supply store?
ETA: Price = $269+change, before shipping.
It’s not a terrible price and getting it all in one swat saves annoyance and trouble but I will advise that the LED light might not give as good a result as you’d like–buds tend to be small and fluffy but okay for personal use. On the plus side they’re easy on the electric bill and don’t generate much heat so that’s a plus.
For cheap nutes I recommend Jack’s by JR Peters, it’s clean and easy to use (you’ll need a proper gram scale but you’ll need that anyway lol) and you’ll spend way less than the stuff in bottles which is likely Jack’s with added water and food coloring in a spendy plastic bottle. Noodle around the site some, I know I’ve seen self contained kits either on the Jack’s or the JR Peters site. All you need is the 5-12-26 Part A, 15-0-0 Part B, 10-30-20 for the first two weeks of flower and 7-15-30 finisher. Since it’s only a few grams per gallon of each of the granular products it lasts a loooooong time and shipping almost costs as much as the nutes but totally worth it if you’ve ever priced out the liquid systems at a grow shop. Oh yeah, and Epsom salts, you can get those anywhere.
That’s enough to get you started, anyway.
I grow tropicals and flower/vegetable starts for my garden indoors under lights (fluorescent and LEDs), and from my perspective I doubt the lamp shown in that ad is going to be adequate to provide the harvest you’d be hoping for.
Insufficient lighting is a problem with kits and light stands sold for other purposes.
There should be a bunch of pot growing forums online that discuss lumens and optimal spectra for cannabis.
*I love that the items in that ad will be sent in “discreet” packaging. 
Lumens are for humans! PAR is what you’re looking for and by a huge margin the most PAR you’re gonna get is from a 1000W double ended HPS light–but double ended fixtures give off a tremendous amount of heat so single ended is more practical. Still heats things up a lot so you’d need A/C in your tent. That little LED fixture would be great for veg but trying to flower underneath it is a mug’s game. Unless you’re going strictly for low consumption personal use, in which case that LED and autoflower plants might fill the bill. Honestly, though, you’d probably get better results from an 8 bulb T5 fixture with the right spectrum bulbs in place.
UPDATE: I looked around, and it seems that I can save about a hundred bucks by buying the individual components separately. However, I shan’t be taking Leafy’s suggestion to buy an LED bulb, and instead will follow the Dope’s recommendation for a better lamp.
I don’t intend to sell my crop. I do, however, have a taste for those tight, dense nugs that one gets at the dispensary, so that’s what I’m going for. Seems that’s not possible with an LED bulb.
It’s possible but it’s spendy–you need a LOT of those LED fixtures and it requires a bit of expertise regarding how close into the canopy you place them, plus a lot of strategic thinning to keep leaf coverage to a minimum. It’s like bonsai–you have to spend a lotta time messing around with it to get it right.
I haven’t grown pot, just vegetables with hydroponics which is essentially what you’re buying, a hydroponic system that is (you hope) optimized for a particular crop.
Yes, you can save money by buying components and assembling your own system, but there’s a learning curve to it and you may wind up quite frustrated by it. Certainly, my first attempts were less than wonderful but losing a bunch of radishes or spinach is probably less aggravating than losing what you’re attempting. If the greens I grew were undersized or otherwise underwhelming well, they still worked just fine in a salad. You’re looking for not just a specific crop but a specific result from growing that crop.
What a kit does is eliminate a lot of the research, guesswork, and experimentation that building such a thing from the ground up eliminates. If you’re looking for results rather than educating yourself about a growing technique in general you’ll probably be happier with a kit.
That said - you need a LOT of light for indoor growing of anything. A LOT. Whatever you initially thought would be enough you’ll probably need 2-4 times that. I’ve yet to see a hydroponics kit for anything that came with adequate light for optimum results.
Since I have no experience with what you’re growing I’d encourage you to listen to experts in that niche. I’m just here to encourage you to start with a kit, even if it means laying down a couple hundred bucks, because you’ll get your results faster and with less frustration.
Oh yeah, I was going to add that the tent you linked to has a very low ceiling so if you go with a hotter light you’re going to want a minimum 72" ceiling and you’ll need a glass shielded fixture with vents and a squirrel cage fan just for the light or you’re gonna cook your plants. On the plus side, at that size of tent you’ll be just fine with a 600W bulb, which is coincidentally the wattage where you get the most light for your electrical buck. Less heat, too. I’d also recommend going with a good digital ballast rather than a cheaper but shittier magnetic ballast, the digitals will control both HPS and metal halide lamps so you can veg then flower under the same fixture, keeps it all tidy and you won’t need a separate veg space. Digitals use less power too. Nanolux is good and not super duper expensive.