How the costing works

Labels declare the active. Materials are sold as they come. A magnesium bisglycinate at 14 percent elemental means 200 mg on the panel needs about 1,430 mg of powder. Extracts standardised to a percentage, mineral chelates, beadlets and triturations all work this way, and the multiplier is often between three and a hundred.

On top of that sits overage. Actives decay on the shelf, so a run is dosed above claim to still meet it at expiry. Ten percent is ordinary for vitamins. Probiotics, sold on live count, are routinely overdosed by half.

weighed out = claim / (assay / 100) x (1 + overage / 100)

Raw materials come in minimum lots, commonly 25 kg. A run needing 3 kg of something buys 25 kg. The other 22 kg is a real cost of that run: paid for, sitting in a warehouse, ageing towards its own retest date.

PriceLeaf charges the whole lot and shows the overbuy on its own line. Ignoring it is the most common reason a first order comes in far above the spreadsheet.

Powder sticks to hoppers, sits in dead legs, and is thrown away at changeover. A few percent, every run, on every ingredient including the expensive one. The builder applies it to material purchased, not to the finished count.

Setup, changeover and the analytical panel are charged once per batch, whether that batch is 500 bottles or 50,000. Spread across a small run they dominate everything else.

For the worked example, 2,500 bottles cost $3.97 each and 50,000 cost $3.01. Same formula, same materials, a 24% difference purely from spreading fixed cost.

This cuts both ways. A bigger run is cheaper per bottle and worse if the product does not sell, because unsold stock expires. The maker lens puts both numbers next to each other for that reason.

Capsules hold a volume, not a mass. Whether a blend fits depends on its bulk density, which varies by more than tenfold: a mineral carbonate is around 1.2 g/ml, a botanical extract around 0.4, and silicon dioxide around 0.08. Three hundred milligrams of silica takes four times the room of 300 mg of calcium carbonate.

The builder computes blend volume per capsule, checks it against the shell, and names the smallest shell that would work. It does the same for the container, so a 180-count bottle is not quietly costed in a 150 cc jar.

The cost model is computed once. Each lens layers only the economics that audience decides with, so the same bottle can be a cash requirement, a quote, a landed cost, a per-order contribution and a markup multiple without any of them disagreeing.

The worked example costs $3.41 to make. What that means depends entirely on which of those five you are.