If you can reliably purchase pills (e.g. they wont get seized in the post), then you can get estradiol and spiro pills and just diy with that. If you can get your blood levels taken regularly that is incredibly helpful and something you should do.

Additionally, there are ways to make gel solution yourself as well, and I remember a vendor selling premade gel in a medical pump container. Medical pump containers are really useful for gel because they dispense a set volume per pump and let you accurately measure mg of estradiol.

it appears that I can buy the form used for estradiol pills

You can also buy the pills themselves. ~~hrtcafe.net~~ (hrt.coffee is the one I was thinking of, hrtcafe.net might also be ok but idk) is the resource that gets recommended for sourcing suppliers, and if you live in canada or the states at least then it’s legal to buy estrogen online (although it might still get seized by customs). As far as making your own pills, I remember that being surprisingly difficult, but you can make estrogen gel, as others have mentioned

Going back to pills, taking them sublingually (dissolving them under your tongue) is very effective and you can actually achieve pretty high levels this way, although it does get processed quickly so you get a big spike of estrogen that goes down quickly, so if you’re taking multiple pills per day it’s better to spread them out over the day instead of taking them all at once. On the other hand, taking the pills orally (just swallowing them) has a smoother curve, but is less effective and has a higher risk of blood clots.

Just make sure you get estradiol/estradiol hemihydrate or estradiol valerate (which is a little less effective than estradiol as a pill but still works fine) and avoid ethinylestradiol, which is a synthetic estrogen and has a higher risk of blood clots

Edit: diyhrt.wiki is a good resource for learning about this

Edit 2: unless you’re doing monotherapy,you also need a T blocker. If you’re doing diy anyway, I would recommend cyproterone acetate over spironolactone; it’s more effective and has less side effects. Just don’t take the whole 50mg pill, a quarter of that, 12.5mg or ~10mg, is enough and you might be able to go even lower. That said, estradiol monotherapy is apparently possible with sublingual, even though most people use injections for monotherapy, so that’s also an option

So to be clear, you're talking about buying bulk estradiol and making pills with it? You could get gel caps, a little scale (not too much money online) and a capsule filler kit, which is also cheap. However, I'm pretty sure there are sources that sell premade pills, and then also gels are available from certain DIY sources. I've never used gel, but from what I've heard (and anyone correct me if I'm wrong here) but gels have the same benefits as injection, but no needles and applying it is quick, easy, and discrete. The only downside of gels I think is that they cost a bit more. Not sure if you've looked into that already, but if injections aren't an option, it seems like gels would be the next best choice.

EDIT: Just did a little bit of research, and it seems estrogel isn't terribly difficult to make. There's one such guide here: https://crimethinc.com/2022/12/15/producing-transdermal-estrogen-a-do-it-yourself-guide I have no experience with estrogel, but I'm tempted to try it out at some point.

This website helped me out tremendously back when I was looking to get started on diy hrt: https://diyhrt.wiki/transfem. It has a lot of good info on transfem hrt, including the two main types of oral intake (swallowing and sublingual).

Don't really know anything about using a dropper, but I remember that the homebrewer TeaHRT sells something like that: https://teahrt.com/product/sublingual-estradiol-oil-dropper-30ml-20mg-ml/. They currently only ship inside , however.

Do not swallow the pills, put them under your tongue or inside your cheek, that way it gets into the bloodstream quicker and actually mostly makes into it. I started off with doing 2mg in morning and in the evening, along with bica 150mg every third day. This is woefully too small, in the long term, but it started to move my fat and smoothed my skin along with getting rid of a lot of T bullshit, and was somewhat affordable

I'm thinking about making a water solution and just taking it out of a dropper, but I know I'd need a preservative to keep it safe for a long time.

I'm assuming because accurate scales are very expensive?

A high concentration grain alcohol like everclear might be an option