What is vaping actually costing you?
Enter what you spend on disposables, pods or liquid and how often you buy them, and this calculator converts it into a weekly, monthly, yearly and five-year figure in your own currency. It also shows what you would keep by cutting down rather than stopping outright. The arithmetic is deliberately plain — your spend, multiplied out — with no assumptions about price rises baked in.
You'd keep $1,040 a year
Saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.
A disposable at $8, bought every other day, is 3.5 a week — about $28 a week, $121 a month, and $1,456 a year.
What to include, and what most people forget
If you use disposables, the sum is simple: the price of one, times how many you get through. That is the whole cost, and it is usually the largest number of the three modes.
Pods and refillables are where people underestimate. The device is the visible cost, but the recurring spend is coils, pods and liquid, and coils in particular have a habit of being bought in threes and forgotten about. Chargers, replacement devices and the ones you lose all belong in the total too.
The figure that tends to land is not the weekly one. It is the five-year number, because nicotine dependence is measured in years rather than weeks, and five years of a moderate habit is frequently more than people have ever spent on anything they chose deliberately.
Why this calculator refuses to do certain sums
It does flat arithmetic and nothing else. No inflation modelling, no tax projections, no compounding "if you had invested it instead" figure.
That is a deliberate limit rather than an omission. Those additions make the total look dramatically larger, and every assumption behind them — a rate of return, a tax change, a price rise — is a guess presented in the same typeface as your actual spend. The result reads as precision and is mostly invention.
Your real spend, multiplied out honestly, is already a large enough number to be worth looking at. It also has the advantage of being true.
What cutting down is worth
The reduction slider exists because stopping outright is not the only outcome worth pricing. Halving your use halves this figure, and for a lot of people a measured reduction is the step that actually happens before a quit attempt does.
If you are working out what a step-down is worth in money, the same logic applies to nicotine strength: dropping from a higher mg/ml to a lower one usually changes the cost per millilitre very little, so the saving comes from using less, not from buying weaker.
What this tool can't do
- It uses a number you estimated. Most people underestimate their own spend, so treat the result as a floor rather than a ceiling.
- It does not account for price rises, tax changes, or currency movement — the arithmetic is flat on purpose.
- Money is one reason among several, and for most people it is not the one that makes a quit attempt stick.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does vaping cost a month?
- It depends entirely on device and frequency, so the useful answer is your own sum rather than an average. Take what one disposable, pod or bottle of liquid costs you, multiply by how many you get through in a week, then multiply by 4.33 for a monthly figure.
- What should I include in the cost?
- Everything recurring: disposables, pods, liquid, coils, and replacement devices. Coils and lost or broken devices are the two people most often leave out, and together they are frequently a fifth of the real total.
- Is vaping cheaper than smoking?
- Often, but not universally — it depends on local cigarette taxes, the device, and how much you use. Run both sums with your own numbers rather than trusting a general claim in either direction.
- Does it account for price rises or tax changes?
- No. Both would require guessing at a rate, and a guessed rate rendered as a precise five-year figure is misleading. The number you see is flat arithmetic on the spend you entered.
- Is anything I enter stored or sent anywhere?
- It stays in this browser on this device and is never transmitted. There is no account and nothing to sign up for.
Keep reading
Puff Zero is a behaviour-tracking app, not a medical device. It does not treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any condition. Talk to a doctor, pharmacist, or a stop-smoking service about quitting nicotine, medication, or symptoms that concern you.