Anyone can DIY, which means anyone can
buy a gallon of PG & VG, buy some Nicotine and buy some flavoring and then get to mixing, but not everyone who does DIY is absorbing the same costs as vendors are, so this is something everyone should consider before complaining about pricing.
As a business owner (unrelated to this market), let me ask those complaining about
juice prices a few questions:
1). As a DIY'er, do you buy glass bottles, drippers, labels and boxes in bulk?
2). As a DIY'er, do you buy or make your own bulk flavoring which requires *much* more time to round out?
3). As a DIY'er, do you have to cover the costs of running & maintaining a business, such as paying employees, business licenses, leasing space, paying for utilities specific to that one location (i.e. not your home / home office), paying taxes on the business etc?
4). As a DIY'er, do you have to worry about carrying bulk stock? As in, enough to cover hundreds of orders? If not thousands?
5). As a DIY'er, have you worked hard to perfect a series of flavors, not a single flavor mix, and covered the cost of R&D to bring it to the market?
Chances are, the 4 questions above nix 99% of DIY'ers that are complaining because you all
don't have to deal with any of it. You buy some PG, VG and Nicotine, you buy a few flavors and then you use a few bottles that you have or buy a few off vendors for $0.30+ each.
You aren't selling it, so you don't have to carry stock or worry about filling orders. You don't have to worry about storage space or make sure that tomorrow's orders will go out on time based on planned shipments the rest of the week, which sometimes get delayed (just like your vape mail).
As a DIY'er, you also don't have to worry about, to a tee, how much it costs to make each bottle. You make some juice, vape it and move on with life. A business owner has to factor how much it costs him for his employees to make each bottle, what share of the cost of utilities is required etc.
It's not as simple as mix, bottle and sell, despite what others may believe.
That said, this doesn't apply to vendors doing basic flavors, I'm talking about places like 5 Pawns, AIV etc. MBV has been mentioned, so I'll use them as an example,
but first I'll say this:
There's nothing wrong with buying from MBV. I have, they work for some, they don't for me.
MBV uses Flavor West, the flavors are cheap and they don't spend a ton on packaging. Using plastic and buying bulk flavors cheap gives you the ability to sell cheaper. The more than goes into putting juice in that bottle, the higher it's going to cost, it's really that simple.
