Hello guys. How much does it cost you to make a good flavoured 120ml juice?? I'm thinking of going to diy route since I vape a lot and I can save some money this way and still vape good liquids.
The Wiki has a link to a detailed breakdown answering your question. Read this -> Simple DIY Example and Price Breakdown
For me, depending on recipe anywhere from $0.02-0.05 per ml. My understanding is that it can be quite a bit more expensive outside the US or if you insist on buying a huge number of flavors. Some flavor vendors are much more expensive than others, and most offer serious volume discounts that make "small batch" a little less economical than, say, minimum 1 liter yields.
If you find a recipe you love and the flavors aren't hard to find, then you can make a ton of that juice for pretty damned cheap.
If, on the other hand, you like having 10+ different juices at the ready you'll be saving a lot less money since you'll need more flavors and supplies.
Yeahh, now I completely get it. Gotta find my adv and stick with it. And I want to buy from US actually, much better price and fast shipping to Canada. I just gotta buy nicotine from Canadian vendors, they won't allow me to import it. Thanks so much man.
I buy almost exclusively from diy-ejuice dot com. Just received a box from them today. Super fast shipping and decent prices with a good selection. They have everything you need. I wouldn't bother with fucking around with the border. My .02 cents.
I also buy from diy ejuice, they do sell nicotine as well but you have to ask them for it. I didn’t know that and bought my nicotine from broke vaper, first time I bought 500ml and then another 1 L (haven’t even touched it yet, just keep it in the freezer). DIY ejuice is nice because they offer free shipping after $100 I believe. I’ve saved a ton of money making juice for my boyfriend and I. (Canadian here!) I’ve spent over $300 but I’ve been making my own juice for a few years now. Easy to save money when good juice is like $40/60 ml here.
I make juice for 2 people and they both only vape one liquid. One of them is $1.80 for a 120mL @18mg and one is $3.12 for a 120mL @24mg w/homemade salts
What's your ratios for homemade salts?
From my very old post:
I did mine using the 'recipes' and calculations from Vermont Vapor.
Citric Acid Solution
1 g Citric Acid USP (anhydrous) 1 ml Distilled Water
Heat water to above 120 deg. F., slowly add citric acid while stirring until all is dissolved and solution is clear (a very, very pale yellow).
According to their recipe, the amount of that solution used was 0.0007566 x (total mg of Nic). ie if I were going to make 100mL of 50mg, I would add 3.78mL of the 1:1 CA Solution.
Early in December I spent about $60 for supplies, pg, vg and several flavors. I have a list of regular flavors and I usually buy small bottles of a couple new flavors when I order. Granted, I now have flavors I know I won’t use but it’s still fun experimenting. I still have enough to make my fiancé and I another 120ml for each of us.
When I bought pre made, I spent about $25-$35 on e juice ever 1.5 weeks. My fiancé’s use is heavier so his was at least $30 weekly.
So yeah, I think it’s cheaper even with a little experimenting with different things. My go to is a simple mix and my fiancé’s is a bit more complex. He took photos of a e juice menu at one of the vape stores. It had the name of the juice and the flavors that was in it. So he just picked ones that he liked. Of course it’s still trial and error when figuring out the percentages, sweetener or no sweetener, steep times etc. we have thrown away a few batches, had some that were ok, some that were meh, and lots that were great.
My advice would be to make very small batches at first so if it’s terrible, you can trash it without too much waste.
Ahhh. Very true. Trial and error is the stairway to success. And I spend like $30 a week as well. So that's why I'm very interested in this route. Also I'm a student so I can't keep spending this much money. Thanks for the kind advices marie.
I wouldn't try experimenting with trial and error just yet. Scrub this sub for 2 flavor, 3 flavor, 3-2-1 flavor mixes that you think you'd like then buy those flavors. Also consider multiple recipes that use some of the same flavor like for example, Vanilla Bean Ice Cream. There's a wealth of info in the sidebar like "My First Order" Flavors
About $3 for my ADV at 3mg. It uses all Inawera flavors too, which aren't the cheapest. Buy nic base from Vaperstek, vg and pg from Nicotine River, and flavors from Bull City Flavors. Those are the best/cheapest vendors for those items respectively. You can also get flavors from Nicotine River and free shipping over $50 so you don't pay an outrageous amount to ship 5 gallons of vg/pg.
Do yourself a favor and don't go buying flavors all willy nilly. Pick 4-5 well reviewed recipes you think you'll like and buy only the flavors to make those.
It's an investment to start but it will save you a ton in the long run. Take a month's worth of juice money and buy supplies to mix instead.
Depends honestly on what goes into it, or how much. If you were to use capella or TFA, the cost per unit is lower than inawera or flavorah, for example. But you tend to use 5% or more of the first two brands, compared to 2 or 3% of the latter.
It also depends on how far down the rabbit hole you wish to go. Many flavours are good on their own, and to get anywhere on your own you will be single flavour testing things anyway...
So you can try single flavours plus a sweetener, or you can try oneshots (chefs flavours have a lot to offer on this front) or you could pick recipes off of here and alltheflavours or e-liquidrecipes and order the flavours specific to the ones you like the sound of.
It's definitely cheaper, unless you have local sellers who do crazy discounts. Saw some place in America offering 120mls for one dollar XD
Thanks so much for such detailed answer! I'm from Toronto. Ejuice is here is very expensive. And if I buy from cheap brands online shipping prices adds up very high. So I gotta go diy. Yes I do plan like single Mango or orange flavour with Koolada+sweetener. I do think it'll much much cheaper than store bought. Thanks again.
Look on here, through the 'flavour of the month' threads and pick out the best choices that way. Some profiles are combination affairs though.
When I first started, strawberry could only really be made through Capella sweet strawberry and TFA strawberry ripe. And I think mango is a similar story. You should look at flavorah Mango, and capella sweet mango. I've only used the second one.
Totally depends on how picky you are about your juice. I quit keeping track when I spent 5 grand on DIY supplies in 2015. Had enough on hand to make gallons at that point though. Recently threw away 30 or 40 pounds of juice and I've done that a few times. Had to quit pouring it down the drain because it slows the plumbing down. I'm at one far end of the spectrum though and you can probably guess which one haha. Some people by 6 flavors, vape 3 mixes and are happy for years.
Hehehe you're a aficionado. I get you lol. I'm light years away from your expertise, but I do want to start slowly. My first priority is to get my vape fix cheaply, then perhaps I'll go up the ranks lol. Thanks for your valuable input.
If I had it to do over again, I probably would have bought some mixed bottles of online mixes that looked good from someone that already had the supplies. Do you have a friend that DIY's?
I gotta be honest, 90+% of online recipes are hot garbage (in my subjective opinion). But the ones I like might be horrible to you. That's the hardest part of DIY. I tell you one thing, you're starting in the right place. I started mixing from other sites and rarely found anything worth mixing a second time. Tons of great recipes here. There's just a lot of information in general. It'll take some time.
Nah. Most of my friends smokes, and two of them vapes. They vape with tanks, and buys ejuice local. They don't chain vape like me, or doesn't have high interest in understanding vaping. I have learned how to build custom coils, rda/rdtas everything myself. I'm very determined to learn this as well lol. I chain vape a lot, and simple flavors appeals to me. Thanks for all your suggestions my man, I hope to take it all in slowly research by research.
I'll break down a 30ml of my own for some real price examples.
Bottles
dropperbottles.com, 110 bottles for $37.40, $45.40 after taxes and shipping. That comes to $0.41 per 30ml bottle, the most expensive portion.
Labels (because I like to be fancy)
Avery 6879 labels from Amazon, $15.88 for 300 labels, free shipping. Comes to $0.05 per label.
VG
Gallon of Froggy's Fog VG from Amazon, $24.99. $0.007 per ml.
PG
Gallon of Froggy's Fog PG from Amazon, same price. $0.007 per ml.
Nicotine
Liquid Nicotine Wholesalers 100mg Nic, 240mL, $14.99. It was about $19 after shipping. $0.08 per ml.
Flavor-wise, let's go with a simple one. Prices from Bull City Flavors.
/u/ID10-T 's Cranberry Sprite.
- FLV Cranberry 1% (15ml for $5.49, $0.36 per ml)
- VT Fizzy Sherbet 2% (30ml for $6.49, $0.21 per ml)
- CAP Lemon Lime 3% (30ml for $4.00, $0.13 per ml)
Breakdown of a 30ml bottle of 3mg 60VG/40PG Cranberry Sprite
- Bottle: $0.41
- Label: $0.05
- 18 ml of VG: $0.126
- 9.3 ml of PG: $0.0651
- 0.9 ml of 100mg Nic: $0.072
- 0.3 ml of FLV Cranberry: $0.108
- 0.6 ml of VT Fizzy Sherbet: $0.126
- 0.9 ml of CAP Lemon Lime: $0.117
Total cost: $1.07
For 120ml of juice...the bottle is the single biggest cost.
wow. and we can reuse them as well too. Also I noticed you're from Canada eh. Do you recommend broke vaper or diy or somebody else to order everything? I'm from Toronto.
Well, if you're in Markham or wherever dashvapes have their diy shop, you could try them. Shipping is the big cost up here. Dashvapes has a low free shipping threshhold but inflated prices to cover that. Bestglycol (from Quebec, not Canada) has great prices, but not the best selection. Also in quebec, savapeur isn't bad for selection (they have some hard to find stuff) but not the greatest selection of the usual suspects. For the best customer service, talk to /u/thebrokevaper and you'll get great service, reasonable (for canada) prices, and decent selection. Occasionally, for some flavors, you're stuck ordering from diyejuice. Unless you order from chef's. For ten bucks you don't get tracking, twenty bucks you do. But they're basically flat rate shipping. You can also order from merkin vendors, but be careful - remember canada allows couriers to choose which customs brokerage they want to use and bill the receiver for the fees, and most use this to scam by having their own brokerages and charging twenty to forty bucks. Only buy from murica if they ship via USPS, never UPS, and usually not fedex.
It costs to develop a great recipe that you like but once you have 2 or 3 recipes you love you will see that there is a lot of savings in diy. I started mixing years ago by watching Wayne Walker DIYORDIE on YouTube and Facebook. He explains everything step by step. There is also a Facebook group that was a huge help to my success when I started mixing. I mix a gallon at a time of a juice that me and my wife loves more than any commercial juice and this gallon costs me less than what x4 '30 ml' bottles was costing before I started mixing. Learn your flavors. I use e-liquid-recipes.com and alltheflavors.com single flavor tests. Just remember that often times you will go through several different ratios of concentrates before making a perfect recipe. I like diy because I can make what I want to taste instead of vaping what someone else made. Learn your safety first and go from there.
Personally if you're looking into diy, test the waters with some pre made flavours.
I use drip hacks for my flavours and found their black mamba to be my all day vape, its a mango/blackcurrant flavour and i drop a little ws-23/koolada in, its very tasty.
As far as cost, i dont know how much i spend, all i know is its way cheaper than what i was spending on pre made juice.
As others have said, finding a flavour you like is the most expensive part, but once you find ones you like, you're golden. Good luck
valuable suggestion! Thanks man.
No problem dude, I've only been making my own for about a year, but i know the basics to make a nice juice, it can be a bit daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it its so straightforward!
If you need any help feel free to give me a shout!
Also, dont forget to steep!! It makes all the difference!
I end up saving roughly pay $70 for enough supplies to make $700 worth of house juice from my local shop I don't make very complex mixes so I only buy 6 flavors and a lot of VG and I do high VG mixes due to PG irritating my throat and by that time I end up with somewhere between $70-$80 worth of supplies and I can make 50 or so 30mls I occasionally run out of one thing before it's time for another order
If you’re just starting out and not fully sure about getting into DIY, start simple, find 2-3 highly rated recipes that you’re fairly certain that you like, and then only purchase the flavors for those recipes along with a liter of unflavored base in your desired strength/VG-PG, some empty bottles and syringes, this should only put you back around $50. If you go about this way, it is very economical, the problem is it’s very tempting to buy a bunch of flavors that look good, but that you’ll end up not liking and won’t ever use. If you then decide that you enjoy DIY, pick up a scale, and purchase PG,VG, and nicotine concentrate separately which will save you even more money.
It costs me approximately 9$ to make 120ml juice. A lot of very good simple recipes out there..
Wow! Which sites would you recommend for simple, high quality ejuice recipes?
I started with this one Beginner’s Guide To Making The Most Highly-Rated Recipes , I recommend creating a user on ELR , you also have All the flavors , also a lot of good helpers on the E-juice 101 chat here.
I've never worked out the price but it's pretty damn cheap once you have a recipe you like.
However, finding a recipe you like may involve buying many different flavors. I don't know, from what I can tell, I seem to be pickier than a lot of other people. I try a lot of recipes that I don't like.
Very true. I'm okay to go through a testing phase. If I may ask you, you do have to steep the ejuice after making it right? Isn't this is a problem with diy? Can you know if the recipe is good instantly?
Yeah, depending on the profile stuff needs to be steep for a few days (most fruit flavors) to a few weeks (custards, cheesecakes and stuff) to up to a month (some tobaccos). When I'm in a testing phase I just have a pipeline of bottles steeping with dates when they're ready marked on them. If it's something you vape a lot of, I'd just recommend that you mix the next batch when you start on a new bottle.
There are recipes called a 'shake and vape' which can be good ones to try. But even those will usually be better with a 1-2 day steep.
But it really depends on what juice you're making and your preference. Some need to steep for a week, others can take 8. And even then different people will have opinions on when it's ready.
But definitely don't wait til you run out, or even close to, before you dive into diy
My cost is anywhere from $2.40-$3.05 per 100ml including the 100ml wide mouth unicorn
Awesome!!
Doing some quick math around 3.17 for 120ml with a 3 flavor mix @ 30/70. not including a container and shipping. I used pricing from Liquid barn for basic ingredients, and 2oz flavoring from nicotine river.
​
Edit- I linked my spreadsheet I made. Thanks for asking this question. It's something I wondered about.
​
calculator - goo.gl/MgwaJC
​
Here is a screenshot of the last batch of grack juice I made. I added cost for everything I bought and it tracks all of it.
That batch was 70/30 4.5% 125ml.
Cost looks like $3.97 and I reused a bottle so no cost there.
Omg, even with so much flavorings the cost is so low!! Thanks my man 👏
My wife and I really enjoy using Fizzmustard’s nana cream clone. I get my PG and VG from Amazon, my flavors from Bill City Flavors, and the Carolina Xtract 120 mL bottle of supercritical 100mg/mL nicotine. If you want a specific breakdown of constituent costs, send me a PM. Making a 60 mL bottle costs me ~$1.50, and the real thing costs ~$25
initially about $1.80 for 15ml because bottles, shipping, etc. but after that about $1.20 for 15ml. I get my recipes from here and a few other places like ATF & ELR and haven't had to throw away any bottles because they were gross. I did have to bin some flavors (in a mix) because I grabbed the wrong bottle or I lost my place but in all honesty I could have just topped it off with VG and guessed the rest and still vape it as long as the nic was correct. I don't care. I mix in 30ml batches so if it turned out to be unvapable crap I'd only be out $2.00
I only smoke flavorless, but i spend maybe 75$ a year and go through about 30-40ml a week.
No, you do not "smoke" flavorless.
ok bud
Hehe, and I vape for flavor. Flavoring is everything to me. Otherwise I'd be riding the Juul train lol. But everybodys preference is unique to them ig.
Ya i just got sick of the flavors and tried flavorless and ended up really liking it. been going about 2 years and tried to go back and its just to sweet now.
You don't save money until you find a recipe you like, stick with it, and buy in bulk.
If you buy small quantities of PG, VG, nic, economies of scale work against you. It costs more per mL to ship small quantities. Shipping large quantities drives the cost down.
The math is pretty simple: (cost of ingredients + shipping) / volume of juice.
Finding your recipe is required for knowing cost of ingredients, and judging by the number of people here with hundreds of flavors and no all-day-vape, the cost of finding your recipe is infinite.
The reality is that most of us don't save money. We're paying for the hobby, and the flexibility of having a ton of variety.
I only mix for myself and I only mix one juice(it uses 4 flavors). I used to always have several different experiments at any given time, boxes of flavorings, constantly throwing money at wizard labs. Now I spend like 50 bucks every couple months and I vape 120ml week or more. Much cheaper to just find one or two adv's and stick to it.
Thanks! My plan is to be like you lol.
that being said, the first step is crucial and a lot of fun. I don't vape nearly that much, but I love having my 10 flavors to choose from at any time. I vape maybe 60ml a week and spend probably 90 a year. I'm in love with FA and their shipping costs aren't bad when you get 20 some flavors at a time.
It's the VG and PG that kill you in shipping costs, but you can get those on Amazon prime cheap
Honestly.. if you’re in the US, you’re doing something wrong. Even cheap juice from a store is going to cost over $20 for 120ml. My local shops it’s more like $35-50. I vape a lot. Used to spend almost $200/mo on juice. My first order (which included a scale and a lot of reusable supplies) was about $200. And I still have a lot of those ingredients. Since then I spent another $50 on more flavors and vg. That first order was 7 months ago. So, not even counting what I still have, I’ve spent $250 and if I’d been buying juice at the stores I would have spent around $1400. That’s.. not a little bit.
I don't wanna go down that route tho. I do understand that when I start doing it, I'll get more interested to try new flavors and spend a lot of money. But my real goal is to save money and chain vape straight up the flavor I enjoy. And I'll do my best to find my adv. Thanks Alex.
Please don't listen that shit. Yes there are upfront costs but that has no bearing on the actual cost per bottle. I have over a 100 flavors, gallons of vg/pg, plenty of nicotine, scale, etc. and still haven't spent enough to equal the cost of 3 months worth of premade juice. At 6 months in I am still at over 50% savings. Going forward with the upfront costs out of the way my cost for juice is just over 1/10th the cost of purchasing premade from vendors.
> The reality is that most of us don't save money. We're paying for the hobby, and the flexibility of having a ton of variety.
I'll point out, though, that if I ever need to hunker down financially, I could spend very little money on consumables for a while.
Definitely. And, I don't know who here smoked cigarettes before vaping, but where I live cigarettes are expensive. I smoked between 10-20 cigarettes a day for many years; that's 5 to 10 dollars minimum PER DAY to smoke. So whatever I do with vaping, it's cheaper than that and bonus: I don't smoke. (2 years this week!)