I don't remember what I paid for my EB's about five-ten years ago, bit IIRC, it was 19.99, but again, it's been a day or two. I'll shouldn't need to buy strings for the rest of my life. My skin ph doesn't break them down and even though I play extremely hard, I've never had any give me tuning problems with age; they just break. I snapped the low E on my Jazz on the opening note of the second song of our set (or course with no backup bass and certainly no backup strings- I just detuned the other three and carried on). Those were Rotosounds, which I still love for certain basses, including that same Jazz.
It was a problem for me when I had to replace my Ernie Ball Slinky 5's on my G&L L-2500 because I strung it through-body and by the time I bought new strings to replace the ones I swapped for the HORRIBLE factory SIT's, EB had changed the length and the exact same model wouldn't fit my bass through-body anymore; had to bridge-string it. I bought several more sets, puzzled that what I had was different from the what was in stores, thinking I had just found an oddball before contacting EB to find out that they HAD changed the design...
ten years before.
The change had happened right after I bought my old set. Ernie Ball sent me three MORE sets for free and I hadn't asked for anything but info.
On top of that, I got five or six sets of strings from an eBay auction with my G&L L-5500 and traded a crap Jackson bass for another eight or ten sets around that same time. The sad thing is that none of them are EB flats, which I'm throughly in love with on my Les Paul, but the ones that are on it are holding up fine. However, I'm trying to resume playing out, so that may change. It's good to know about the silk on Chromes versus the EB's though: one more reason for me to stick to the EB version.