Soap pricing calculator

Multiply your true cost per bar by four for retail. Most cold process bars cost between $2.50 and $4.50 to make once you include oils, lye, fragrance, packaging and your own labor, which puts retail around $10 to $18. Artisan bars with expensive essential oils or elaborate designs sit higher. Use the calculator above with your own supplier prices, not these averages.

Take what you paid for each ingredient package and divide by the amount in the package to get a cost per ounce, then multiply by how much your recipe uses. Add labor for the whole batch, an overhead percentage and packaging, then divide the total by the number of sellable bars. The calculator on this page does all of it as you type.

Yes, and by more than most makers expect. Essential oils can cost four to ten times what a comparable fragrance oil costs, and a batch may use one to two ounces. Enter your actual essential oil price and you'll usually find the bar needs to be one to three dollars dearer to hold the same margin.

It doesn't change the cost per bar, but it changes how much margin you need. Cold process soap ties up your money for four to six weeks between buying oils and making a sale, so your margin has to be thick enough to fund the next batch while the current one cures. Thin margins are what starve soap businesses of cash.

Wholesale is typically twice your cost per bar, which leaves a shop room to double it again and land near your retail price. Wholesale margins are much thinner, so they only make sense on larger orders. Check the per-batch profit figure in the calculator, not just the per-bar one.

No, and that's deliberate. Lye calculations are safety-critical and belong in a dedicated lye calculator such as SoapCalc or Bramble Berry's. Get your recipe right there, then bring the finished ingredient amounts here to price it.

The same way, and it's simpler because there's no cure time. Enter your soap base as one material with its package price and how much each bar uses, add fragrance, color and packaging, then include your labor. Melt and pour is faster to make, so labor per bar is lower, but the base costs more than raw oils, and the cost per bar often lands in a similar place.

That's useful information, and it's worth having before you make another batch. Usually it means the batch is too small. Soap costs drop sharply with size because the pour takes the same time whether you cut 10 bars or 24. If a bigger batch still doesn't close the gap, your options are cheaper oils, simpler packaging, or selling to buyers who value what makes yours different. Enter a market price above and the calculator will show you the size of the gap.

Yes, entirely. There's no account, no email address and no signup, and the calculator doesn't stop working after a few batches. Your recipes and prices stay in your own browser, never on our servers.