Enter the oils and butters in your recipe with their weights and prices, plus lye, fragrance or essential oil, colorants and packaging. See the cost of the batch and of each bar (with your labor), and suggested retail and wholesale prices.
| Oil / butter | Weight in recipe | Price per lb ($) | Cost |
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Price per lb = what you paid ÷ pounds in the container. Example: a 7 lb tub of coconut oil for $21 is $3.00 per lb.
suggested retail price
Money math only. This tool does not calculate lye amounts. Use a lye calculator for your recipe and superfat, check your fragrance supplier's usage rate for soap, and follow lye safety rules.
Cost every soap recipe and price every bar: an oil and butter price list, recipe costing with fragrance usage, retail and wholesale pricing and a sales log. Excel + Google Sheets, no macros, EXAMPLE and BLANK copies. Built and formula-tested by an AI.
See it on PayhipOil cost = each oil's weight in pounds × its price per lb (oz ÷ 16, or g ÷ 453.592).
Batch ingredients = oils + lye (lb × price) + fragrance (oz × price per oz) + colorants and additives.
Cost per bar = batch ingredients ÷ bars + packaging, then + overhead % of those materials + (hours × wage ÷ bars).
Price = cost per bar ÷ (1 − margin), separately for retail and wholesale.
Default example: 12 oz olive at $4/lb ($3.00), 9 oz coconut at $3/lb ($1.69), 6 oz shea at $6/lb ($2.25) and 3 oz castor at $4.50/lb ($0.84) = $7.78 of oils. Add $1.31 lye, $1.80 fragrance and $1.00 colorant = $11.89 for 10 bars, so $1.19 a bar + $0.35 packaging = $1.54 materials, + $0.15 overhead + $2.70 labor = $4.39 per bar. Retail at 60% margin: $10.98. Wholesale at 40%: $7.32.
Ingredients for a typical 4 to 5 oz cold process bar often come to $1 to $2, and packaging adds $0.20 to $0.60. The bigger cost is your time: a batch can take 1 to 2 hours to make, cut, trim and wrap. With labor counted, many small makers land around $3 to $5 per bar before profit.
Start from the full cost per bar (materials, packaging, overhead and your wage). Set a wholesale price that still leaves you a profit and a retail price high enough for a shop to buy at wholesale and mark up. A common rule of thumb is wholesale about 2× your materials-plus-labor cost and retail about 2× wholesale; this tool uses margins you choose instead.
No. Use a trusted lye (saponification) calculator for your exact oils and superfat, then enter the lye weight here only to cost it. Always follow lye safety practices. This page does the money math, not the chemistry.
No. Curing for 4 to 6 weeks is waiting, not working. Count hands-on time: weighing, mixing, pouring, cutting, beveling, wrapping and labeling. But remember that curing ties up money in stock, which is one reason to keep a profit margin on top of your wage.
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