Here's Exactly How Much We're Saving By Using DIY Cleaning Supplies

A few years ago, our cleaning cabinet looked like every other American household’s. But somewhere along the way, we realized that we were paying for a dozen different bottles when a handful of pantry staples could do the same job for a fraction of the price.

Today, our cleaning routine runs primarily on four ingredients we buy in bulk: baking soda, white vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and liquid castile soap (plus washing soda, Epsom salt, and sea salt for laundry soap). We buy the big wholesale versions of these, mix them into simple recipes, and use them to clean almost everything in our home.

I wanted to know exactly how much this was saving us, so I did the math.

Here’s the full breakdown: what we buy, how we mix it, and what it actually costs compared to buying products off the shelf.

Here are the exact ingredients that we buy. Most of these we buy in bulk from Sam’s Club (baking soda, white vinegar, rubbing alcohol, Epsom salt, sea salt) or Amazon (liquid castile soap).

That’s it. Everything below is built from this list.

Recipe (one batch fills a 64oz mason jar):

• 1½ cups baking soda

• 1½ cups washing soda

• ½ cup Epsom salt

• ¼ cup sea salt

Mix the dry ingredients together with a whisk. We typically mix ours in a large bowl and then funnel it into a 64oz mason jar.

Use 1 tablespoon per load of laundry.

Cost per batch:

One batch makes 3¾ cups (60 tablespoons), which covers 60 loads of laundry, bringing the cost to about 3.4 cents per load.

We do a load of laundry every single day, so that’s 7 loads a week, or 364 loads a year.

Even compared to the cheapest bulk option at the store, we’re saving somewhere between $24 and $242 a year on laundry soap alone.

Recipe (one batch is about 32 fl oz):

• 2 cups white vinegar

• 2 cups water

• ⅛ cup rubbing alcohol (we use 90%)

Combine in a spray bottle and shake lightly before each use. No separate glass cleaner needed — this one bottle of cleaner handles glass, mirrors, counters, and most other surfaces.

Cost per batch:

One batch lasts us about 1.5 weeks, which works out to roughly 1.5 cents per fluid ounce and $16.75 a year.

For comparison, a name-brand glass cleaner runs about 12.4 cents per fluid ounce, and a name-brand multipurpose spray runs about 10.9 cents per fluid ounce. Because our one recipe replaces both of those separate products simultaneously, buying enough of each to match our usage would cost roughly $129 a year.

That means this single bottle saves us about $112 a year, or roughly 87%.

Recipe:

• 1 part liquid castile soap

• 4 parts water

We buy castile soap in a 1-gallon jug and dilute it directly into our bathroom pumps bottles, which stretches one gallon of concentrate into 5 gallons of hand soap, which is enough to cover our household's usage for about 29 months (our last jug lasted from October 2023 to March 2026).

What it costs:

That’s about $27 a year saved on hand soap, or 62% cheaper.

Added together, switching three everyday products to DIY versions saves our household somewhere between $163 and $382 a year.

I know that doesn’t sound like much, but that gap may actually increase over the coming years — a recent article reported that the maker of Lysol will be increasing prices on their products to help offset increases in input costs trigged by the war in Iran.

And saving money is great, but that’s not the only benefit.

For one, DIY cleaning supplies generates almost none of the packaging waste that buying separate bottles for every job does. And because we use simple ingredients, so we know exactly what is in the cleaning supplies we’re using and what chemicals we’re being exposed to.

None of these recipes are complicated, but if you’re looking for one place to start, the multipurpose cleaner is the easiest win. It takes about two minutes to mix, replaces two separate store-bought products, and delivers the biggest percentage savings of the three.

In the spirit of transparency, I want to make it clear that not every cleaning supply in our house is DIY. We stick with store-bought dishwasher tablets and liquid dish soap specifically because the DIY versions we’ve tried have either left behind residue or struggled to cut grease. If you have a good recipe for DIY dish soap or dishwasher detergent, please share!

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¹_{Ingredient costs are based on our actual Sam’s Club receipts. Prices for store-bought cleaning supplies represent current national averages for comparable products and will vary by brand, region, and sales. Your own savings will depend on how much laundry you do and how quickly you go through cleaning supplies.}