Cost per bottle calculator

The sum, in words

Turn the bottle volume into a weight, split that weight into concentrate and everything else, price each part from what you paid per kilo, and add the packaging.

A 50 ml bottle of finished liquid at 0.87 grams per milliliter weighs 43.5 g. At 20 percent, 8.7 g of that is concentrate and 34.8 g is alcohol. Concentrate at 400 per kilo makes the concentrate in one bottle cost 3.48; alcohol at 12 per kilo adds 42 cents. With four for the bottle, cap and carton, the bottle has cost you 7.90 before anything else.

This is a floor, not a price

What this counts is the materials and the packaging. What it does not count is most of what a fragrance business actually spends:

• Your time, in blending, filling, labeling, packing and answering emails.
• The safety assessment, which is a real cost per product and is spread across however many you sell.
• Labels, and the print run you threw away when the formula changed.
• Breakage, returns, samples given away, and stock that never sells.
• Shipping, payment fees, and the platform's cut if you sell through one.
• Tax, and the difference between what a customer pays and what reaches you.

A price built from the materials figure alone is a price that loses money on every bottle, and does it invisibly until the year is totalled up. What the figure is genuinely good for is comparison: which of your products is expensive to make, what a change of concentrate does to the cost, and whether a strength change pays for itself.

Working out what your concentrate costs per kilo

This is the input people guess at, and it is the one that matters most, because at 20 percent strength the concentrate is usually the largest single cost in the bottle.

It is the sum of what each material in the formula cost you, in the proportion it appears. A material at 2 percent of the formula that costs 3,000 per kilo contributes 60 per kilo of concentrate. Do that for every line and total it. If you build from dilutions, price the dilution rather than the neat material, because most of what you weighed was solvent.

Two things people forget. The price you paid, not the price it is listed at now. And the waste: what you lost in trials, in transfers and in the bottom of bottles is a real cost of the material, even though no formula line records it.

The density here is an assumption

This works on a finished liquid weighing 0.87 grams per milliliter, which is typical of an alcoholic perfume and is not measured from yours. It is said here rather than hidden in the arithmetic because a number you cannot see is a number you cannot check.

For a cost estimate that is close enough. For weighing out a real batch it is not, and the bottle batch calculator on this site asks you for the density rather than assuming one.

What this calculator does not do

It costs one bottle from a price per kilo you worked out somewhere else. What it cannot do is keep that price current: material prices move, a lot bought last year cost something different from the one bought today, and a formula that changed has a different cost the moment it changed. A cost that has to be recalculated by hand is a cost that quietly goes stale.