Calculator
What vaping actually costs you
Most people underestimate this by a factor of two, because the spend arrives in small forgettable amounts. Put your real numbers in and see the annual figure.
Your numbers
One year of that money is roughly:
This calculation happens on your device. No figures are transmitted, stored, or logged, there is no analytics script on this page at all. That is the same principle the app runs on.
Why the number is usually higher than people guess
Vaping spend is unusually easy to lose track of, for three structural reasons.
It arrives in small increments. Nobody experiences $2,900 leaving their account. They experience $8, roughly three hundred and sixty times, each one individually trivial. This is precisely the pattern that defeats intuition, which is why writing the annual figure down tends to land harder than any health warning.
Consumption drifts upward. A cigarette habit is self-metering: a pack contains twenty and then it's gone. A vape has no such boundary. Usage tends to expand to fill available time, and because tolerance builds, last year's device often isn't satisfying at this year's baseline.
The hardware is a recurring cost disguised as a one-off. Disposables are the extreme case, you're re-buying the battery, the coil, and the casing every single time. That's why the disposable route is frequently the most expensive way to consume nicotine available today, often costing more per year than cigarettes in low-tax states.
Typical annual ranges
Rough US figures to sanity-check your own number against. Prices vary widely by state and by how heavily you use, so treat these as reference points rather than averages.
| Habit | Typical unit cost | Rough annual spend |
|---|---|---|
| Disposable a day | $6 to $10 each | $2,200 to $3,600 |
| Disposable every other day | $6 to $10 each | $1,100 to $1,800 |
| Pods, 4 per week | $4 to $6 per pod | $830 to $1,250 |
| Pods, 2 per week | $4 to $6 per pod | $415 to $625 |
| Bottled e-liquid | $12 to $20 per bottle | $300 to $600 |
| Pack a day (cigarettes) | $7 to $13 per pack | $2,550 to $4,750 |
Whatever number you just landed on is an annual subscription you never consciously signed up for, renewing in tiny instalments, with no cancel button in the settings. Framing it that way, rather than as a health statistic, is what makes it feel concrete, and the money is genuinely the most reliably motivating part of quitting for a lot of people, because unlike lung function it shows up in your account within a week.
What people actually do with it
A year of a moderate vaping habit is somewhere between a decent used car deposit and a two-week holiday. Five years of a disposable-a-day habit is comfortably five figures, which is deposit money. The point isn't that you'd necessarily spend it well, it's that right now you're spending it on something you've probably told yourself you want to stop doing.
Common questions
Is vaping cheaper than smoking?
Usually, on a per-day basis, though disposables narrow the gap sharply and can exceed cigarette costs in states with low tobacco tax. The larger difference is behavioural: cigarettes are rationed by the pack, vaping generally isn't, so vaping spend tends to creep.
How much will I save if I quit?
All of it, which for most people is between $500 and $3,000 a year. Use your real numbers above rather than an average, since the spread across device types is enormous.
Should I switch to a cheaper device instead of quitting?
It'll cut the spend, and it won't touch the dependence. Moving from disposables to refillable liquid is a legitimate harm-and-cost reduction step, but it's a different goal from quitting, and it's worth being honest with yourself about which one you're actually pursuing.
Watch this number grow in your favour
Lungful counts your savings live from your quit date, alongside a free craving SOS button and CDC-sourced recovery milestones. No account, no ads, no trackers.