It's the same principle as anything done for you vs. doing it yourself. It's always cheaper to educate yourself and make or do something yourself, except in the case of surgery. I don't think you want to give yourself a triple bypass or excise your own brain tumor.....

I've always wondered why many commercial juices gunk up coils so bad, I have one brand I always go to that doesn't, but of course it's expensive unless I buy it on sale.

So I have a similar experience, I've been kinda disappointed in alot of the juices I've made lately...mainly fruit flavors...from the recipes I've tried on ELR to the attempts at building my own recipes, one shots, single flavor testing, I've pretty much been let down in the hunt for a decent fruit/mixed fruit flavor.

So I went and bought some commercial juice. The first one was a watermelon taffy flavor bc watermelon has been one of the flavors that has been giving me the most trouble and I bought a 60ml for $20. The cheapskate in me cringed bc I know at the very least that's a decent amount of flavors I could have bought. The watermelon was almost non existent and the sweetener was the obvious star of the show. Ive been trying it here and there and the last time I got more flavor, but the sweetener was still powerful.

Today out of boredom I went into a vape shop to see what they had and found a fruit twist line that came out after I began diy that I was always curious about. Another $20 60ml, but the guy was nice and gave it to me for $15. This is sweetener mixed with some tropical fruit flavor. I'm pretty sure it's capella super sweet.

This has given me even more respect for diy because I've found alot of dope juices that use minimal to no sweetener and are better in flavor, and I actually found a new respect for commercial juices because it's truly an art to put that much sweetener into a juice and it still be vapeable. I put a drop of super sweet in a 10ml and depending on the flavors it's unbearable...these things have a crap ton of sweetener and it's almost like this juice is gonna be worse without it

I found a juice on sale that I used to vape a couple years ago. I figured I would blow through the bottle and want another. However, after filling up a squonk bottle, I only made it half way through the squonk bottle before dumping it out to vape my own stuff again. Suprising because I used to only buy this juice and now I can't stand it. It was just too much sweetner.

Damn dude I feel your pain. I moved to HK last year and it's very difficult to get ingredients here, especially nicotine since it's illegal. So I have to buy commercial juice, and it's like £25 for 60ml or £30 for 100ml.

It also tastes much worse than good diy recipes... I got a strawberry milkshake the other day and damn I could have just made mustard milk for a fraction of the price and 10 times the flavour

The only premade juice I found that doesn't gunk up my coils in a few days was from Oasis vape, and they stopped shipping to my state because shitty laws.

So I started DIY

it's interesting you bring up the coughing, I recently started vaping store bought salt nic and have been coughing a fair bit. I intended to just use store bought until my salt nic came in but then quarantine hit

I started DIY because I didn't enjoy a lot of the commercial flavours. Have now realised this is because of the obscene amounts of sweetener and not much real flavour. Much prefer mixing something up and having it taste at least sort of what it's meant to. Mostly use Caliburn Koko with Nic Salts for work so I mostly mix for this. Now got a Nunchaku 2 for Sub-Ohm as well which is nice but definitely a different experience mixing with less concentrate. Made some Grape Bubblegum yesterday and added 0.5% CAP Super Sweet and crickey dicks you can taste the Sweetener even at that amount. 0.5% is about 2.5 drops every 10mL iirc, crazy how it's so strong in a Sub-Ohm but doesnt make much difference except at high pct in pods. Also saw someone comment about how the Aegis Pod device is same price as 8 of its pods, try Uwell Caliburn ect lol they're so ignorant that their devices cost little more than 2 of their 4-pack of pods so about the same as the Aeigis, crazy that they can cash in so hard but they Nic Salt Pod devices are super handy for working every day. Idk how high my Nic intake is now though because I DTL 6mg and MTL 35-50mg. Used to vape this cheap commercial juice that wasn't over sweet but didn't have as much flavour as it could either, hard to win with commercial juice.