Free tool
Ingredient lot trace exposure calculator
See how far one questionable herb lot reaches into your production and what it would cost you in hours to reconstruct the trail by hand.
Free tool, no sign up
Custom blend price calculator
Enter what one batch actually consumed and see the loaded cost per finished bottle, a working shelf price, and what the whole batch contributes.
Most herbalists price a custom tincture by looking at the shelf tincture beside it and adding a few dollars. That works until the formula calls for a costly root, or the maceration runs six weeks, or the client wants 4 oz instead of 2 oz. The way out is to price the batch, not the bottle, and let the arithmetic hand you the per bottle number.
The defaults below describe a fairly ordinary run: about $77 of herb and cane alcohol, roughly three and a half hours of bench and write up time, and 24 bottles filled after press loss. Replace each figure with your own from the last batch you ran and see what your current shelf price is really covering.
Your result
Ingredient cost per bottle
$3.21
Botanicals and menstruum carried by each finished bottle.
Loaded cost per bottle
$12.11
Herbs, menstruum, packaging and your bench time, all paid.
Working shelf price
$31.50
Loaded cost at a 2.6 multiple, rounded up to the nearest fifty cents.
Batch contribution above cost
$465
What the whole run leaves you toward rent, licensing and the herb wall.
The 2.6 multiple is a common working figure for retail herbal products; shops selling half their volume wholesale usually build the price from a higher multiple so the wholesale line still clears cost.
Why press loss belongs in the price
The marc holds onto liquid. Depending on the herb, the press and how patient you are, a quart of menstruum does not come back as a quart of tincture, and heavy roots and barks keep more than leaf and flower. If you price on the volume you poured in rather than the bottles you filled, you undercharge on exactly the formulas that cost you the most to make.
Enter the filled bottle count, not the batch volume divided by bottle size. Do that for three or four batches and you will have a real yield factor for your own press, which is more useful for planning than any figure in a formulary.
Paying yourself for consult and bench time
A custom formula carries a cost that a shelf product does not: the twenty minutes of thinking that produced the ratio, plus the write up on the client record. Owners routinely leave that out because it does not feel like production work, and then wonder why a week full of custom blends pays worse than a week of syrup runs.
Set the hourly figure at what you would pay a competent person to do the same work, not at what is left over after everything else is paid. If the resulting shelf price looks impossible for your town, the answer is usually a larger batch size or a shorter formula, not a smaller number in the rate box.
Questions about this calculator
Should overhead like rent and licensing sit in this calculation?
Not directly. This tool gives you the loaded cost of one bottle and the contribution the batch makes above that cost. Rent, insurance, licensing fees and the herb wall you keep stocked come out of the total contribution across all your batches in a month. If your monthly contribution does not cover those, the multiple or the batch size has to move.
How do I handle a formula where one herb is far more expensive than the rest?
Enter the actual herb cost for that batch rather than an average across your shelf. Expensive roots, imported barks and anything wildcrafted at low volume will push the per bottle number up sharply, which is the correct signal. Price that formula on its own numbers instead of blending it into a general tincture price.
Does this work for salves and syrups as well as tinctures?
Yes, with two adjustments. Put the oil, beeswax and any infused base into the menstruum line, and count jars rather than bottles in the yield field. Salve batches usually have lower ingredient cost per unit and higher bench hours, so the labor line matters even more than it does for tinctures.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The traceable batch record sheet
One page you can print, clip to the bench and fill in as you work, built so any finished bottle traces back to the jars it came out of.
Now put that number on a live batch
The figure above came from estimates you typed once. In HerbalCounter it comes from the batch you closed on Tuesday, with the grams weighed, the bottles counted after filtration and the herb lot codes already on the record. Ask for a demo and we will load one of your own formulas so the per bottle cost and the trace both fall out of the same sheet.