What vaping really costs per week, worked out line by line

Kit prices grab attention, but a £10 device is a one-off. What you pay every week is liquid, and the fairest way to compare liquids is price per ml. A 10ml nic salt at £2.99 works out at about 30p per ml. A Lost Mary BM6000 refill pack at £6.95 gives 12ml, so roughly 58p per ml, in exchange for not having to fill anything.

Shortfills look the cheapest of all. A 50ml bottle at £7.99 plus a 99p nic shot makes 60ml of 3mg for £8.98, or about 15p per ml. The catch is that sub-ohm tanks use so much more liquid per day that the weekly bill still ends up higher than a pod kit. Cheap per ml is not the same as cheap per week.

Your number depends on three things: how much liquid you get through, what you pay for it, and how often you replace a pod or coil. Everything else is small change. The calculator does the sums once you put those in, and gives you a weekly and a yearly figure so you can see the full picture.

Not sure how much liquid you use? Fill a 2ml pod and count the days until it is empty. Most MTL vapers land between one and three days per pod, which is 5ml to 14ml a week. If you buy your liquid in 10ml bottles, that is between half a bottle and a bottle and a half each week. Plug your real numbers in rather than guessing, because the difference between light and heavy use is big.

A refillable pod or coil head is a consumable, just like liquid. When the cotton gunks up, flavour drops and you replace it. Most daily vapers get through one a week, give or take, so it is worth knowing the price per unit, not just the pack price.

The bars below show the price of a single pod or coil from packs on our shelf. Caliburn pods come four to a pack at £9.99, so about £2.50 each. Innokin Prism coils come five for £6.99, so about £1.40 each. Clear, less sweet liquids stretch every one of these further, which is the easiest saving available.

If you are switching from cigarettes, the comparison that matters is your own: what you spend on tobacco each week against what your vape will cost. Prices vary by brand and by shop, so use your real receipts rather than a national average.

Run through the steps once and write the two numbers down. Do it again after a month, because your usage usually settles after the first few weeks and the real figure tends to be lower than week one, when most people puff more while they get used to it. Keep the kit price separate, since you only pay it once.

Most savings come from habits, not from hunting for the cheapest bottle. Coils and pods last longer when you prime them, keep them topped up and avoid running them dry. Liquid lasts longer when you stop chain vaping. Neither costs you anything.

After that, buying in sensible quantities helps. Multipacks and offers on our deals page bring the per-bottle price down, and moving from sealed pods to a refillable kit is the single biggest change most people can make. Tick off the ones you already do. Even two or three of them, done every day, tend to make a visible difference to how often you need to reorder.

Here is a question that catches out a lot of people who compare only bottle prices. Think about how much liquid each setup actually uses in a day, not just what the bottle costs on the shelf.

Pick an answer and read the explanation underneath. If you get it right, you have understood the one idea that matters most for keeping vaping cheap: price per ml multiplied by how many ml you use. Everything else, from kit price to pack size, is a footnote by comparison. Once you know your own usage, you can price any setup in about thirty seconds.