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My group is in the same boat as you. As such we use a bit of house ruling.
We say that you can only buy materials up to the max a town can support in a given time frame.
So let's say you want to build an item that will cost 30k but the town has a gp limit of 20k. You could buy most of the materials but have to wait for suppliers to restock to buy the rest of what you need. The timeframe is then up to GM discretion for when the town can get its next shipment of goods in.
I'd be interested to know how it actually works myself.
The price limit for magic items of a city has nothing to do with the ability to find raw materials for item creation by RAW. Nowhere does it mention how or where you find those materials. Therefore, the size of the city has no direct mechanical influence on availability of materials for item creation. Think carefully before you use the size of the city as a limiter. If the PCs are in a small town somewhere and need to make some scrolls or potions or wands and the town has a low limit, they can't use their feats to create such items. Taken to a logical conclusion-how do you create the more powerful magic items? If you use some sort of timeframe, then you're making the creation of magic items take even longer, as that's time that must pass before the process can even begin. Many campaigns don't have much time for item creation as it is, and you're going to lengthen the time required that way. That also weakens the PCs who need that gear to remain competitive with the critters they fight, as they won't have necessary gear for that much longer.
The price limit for magic items of a city has nothing to do with the ability to find raw materials for item creation by RAW. Nowhere does it mention how or where you find those materials. Therefore, the size of the city has no direct mechanical influence on availability of materials for item creation. Think carefully before you use the size of the city as a limiter. If the PCs are in a small town somewhere and need to make some scrolls or potions or wands and the town has a low limit, they can't use their feats to create such items. Taken to a logical conclusion-how do you create the more powerful magic items? If you use some sort of timeframe, then you're making the creation of magic items take even longer, as that's time that must pass before the process can even begin. Many campaigns don't have much time for item creation as it is, and you're going to lengthen the time required that way. That also weakens the PCs who need that gear to remain competitive with the critters they fight, as they won't have necessary gear for that much longer.
There are no rules because it is left up to the GM.
If we use your logic, we get the situation of someone stopping in at a thorp that has 10 people in it and buying 100K worth of supplies at level 20 to craft a new set of armor.
That means that each person in that thorp now has 10,000gp, so much that they could spend a silver piece a day for the rest of their lives and still leave their grand children a tidy sum.
I find the GP limit of the town makes perfect sense, you're buying up that much in supplies this month. At higher levels, the PCs have ready access to the ability to travel to multiple cities in a short time (flight, teleport, planar travel even). So this is not really a limit on their ability to craft, just a crutch to keep dumb results like thorps being filled with millionaires.
At lower levels, they aren't usually needing enough supplies to 'break' a small town or large town, much less a large or small city.