Pence, Pumps and Postage: A Month of Everyday CBD, Added Up
Photo: elsaolofsson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
CBD is one of those purchases where the sticker price tells you almost nothing. A £22 bottle can be worse value than a £35 one. A subscription can save you money and cost you more. And the last few drops in the bottle are never free.
So for October 2026, we kept a spending diary. Not a brand audit, not a lab test — just one ordinary UK household, two adults, a bathroom cupboard with too many half-empty bottles in it, and a habit of buying CBD the way most people do: slightly on the hop.
Here is what the month cost, bottle by bottle, and what we would do differently.
The setup: two adults, one cupboard, no grand plan
One adult used 10mg in the morning and 10mg in the evening, most days. The other used 10mg on perhaps nine evenings across the month, usually after a long day. Nothing heroic. No mega-doses, no elaborate stack of tinctures and capsules. Just oil, a dropper, and a balm that lives by the kettle.
At the start of the month, the cupboard already contained a 10ml 500mg bottle with roughly 150mg left and a 10ml 300mg bottle with about 80mg left. Both had been opened earlier in the year. This matters, because half-used bottles are part of the real cost of CBD — even when they are not part of this month’s receipt.
What we bought
| Item | Size and strength | Price | Postage | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bottle A | 10ml, 1000mg | £34.99 | £3.95 | £38.94 |
| Bottle B | 30ml, 1500mg, subscription at 15% off | £50.15 | £0 | £50.15 |
| Bottle C | 10ml, 500mg, bought on the high street | £21.50 | £0 | £21.50 |
| Balm | 50ml | £13.99 | £0 | £13.99 |
| Total | £124.58 |
The only comparison that counts: pence per milligram
Bottle A worked out at 3.5p per milligram of CBD before postage, and 3.9p once the £3.95 delivery was included. A 10mg serving therefore cost between 35p and 39p. Bottle B, the subscription 1500mg, came in at 3.3p per milligram. Bottle C, the 500mg high-street bottle, was 4.3p per milligram.
That is the quiet trap: the £21.50 bottle felt like the cheap option, but per milligram it was the most expensive of the three. Postage is the other small print. On a £34.99 order, £3.95 delivery adds more than a tenth to the cost. On a £60 order with free delivery, it disappears. Buy two small bottles a month instead of one larger one and you can easily lose £8 a month to postage alone.
What we actually used
Across October, the household consumed about 710mg of CBD: 230mg from the old half bottles, then 480mg from Bottle A. The 1500mg subscription bottle was opened at the very end of the month. Bottle C stayed in the cupboard. The balm was used, but it is not an ingested CBD product and should not be folded into a cost-per-milligram calculation.
At the blended purchase rate of roughly 3.7p per milligram for the oils, the 710mg actually used represents about £26 of CBD. The rest of the £124.58 total was stock, balm, postage and the cost of buying slightly ahead of need. That is not necessarily waste — but it is cash flow, and it is worth seeing clearly.
Where the money quietly leaks
Postage on small orders. Paying £3.95 to deliver a £35 bottle is an 11% surcharge. It feels small at checkout. Across a year, it is not.
Subscription creep. The 15% discount on Bottle B saved £8.85. But the renewal arrived before Bottle A was finished. A discount is only a discount if you would have bought the bottle anyway.
The bottom of the bottle. A 10ml bottle with 0.5ml left is 5% of the bottle. On a 1000mg bottle, that is 50mg, or about £1.75 at 3.5p per milligram. Over a year, with four or five bottles, that is £7 to £9 — not a scandal, but not nothing.
The cupboard graveyard. We used the old bottles first, which is why the month’s usage looks higher than the new receipts. The old 500mg and 300mg bottles had cost about £9 in total when bought. Using them felt like found money. Leaving them would have been a small, silent loss.
Sticker price versus strength. A 500mg bottle at £21.50 can look like better value than a 1000mg bottle at £34.99. The maths says otherwise. Always divide the price by the total milligrams.
Balm creep. A balm is a nice thing. It is also not a cost-per-milligram purchase. Keep it in a separate mental budget rather than pretending it makes the oil better value.
A fairer way to buy next month
- Work out your daily milligrams, multiply by 30, and buy the nearest bottle size. If you use 20mg a day, that is 600mg a month. A 1000mg bottle is a sensible size; three 300mg bottles usually are not.
- Compare pence per milligram, including postage. Price ÷ total CBD mg = pence per mg. Then multiply by your serving size.
- Check that the label states CBD in milligrams. Hemp seed oil with no CBD figure is a different product.
- Treat subscriptions as a commitment. A 15% discount is only a saving if the bottle would have been bought anyway.
- Keep opened bottles together and use them in order. The bottom of the bottle counts.
The month in numbers
Total spent: £124.58. CBD oils only: £110.59, including £3.95 postage. Subscription saving: £8.85. CBD bought: 3,000mg across three bottles. Blended cost across those oils: about 3.7p per milligram. CBD actually consumed: about 710mg, or roughly £26 at that blended rate. Estimated wastage from the bottom of opened bottles: about £1.75. Old half bottles rescued: about £8.50 worth of CBD, measured at the same rate.
The honest takeaway is not that CBD is expensive or cheap. It is that CBD becomes expensive when you buy by sticker price, pay postage on small orders, let subscriptions outrun use, and forget what is already in the cupboard. The receipt is not the routine. A month of ordinary use can cost £26 in actual CBD, or £124 in cash out — and both numbers are true, just not at the same time.
If you are using CBD for a health reason, it is worth speaking to a pharmacist or GP, especially if you take other medicines. This is a spending diary, not medical advice. But as a shopping exercise, the maths is refreshingly simple: strength first, postage second, cupboard audit third.
