If you are buying something every day for the foreseeable future, the sticker price on the tub is not the number that matters. What matters is what a day costs, and whether the format you picked out of habit is quietly costing you double.
This is the arithmetic, shown in full, using our own prices. You can run the same three steps on any brand, including any brand you find cheaper than us.
The three numbers
1. Cost per serving. Price of the container divided by the number of servings inside it. Not the number of sticks in a marketing photo, the number on the label.
2. Cost per gram of sodium. Cost per serving divided by the grams of sodium in one serving. A Saltivate serving contains 800 mg of sodium, which is 0.8 g, so cost per gram of sodium is cost per serving divided by 0.8.
3. Cost per day. Cost per serving multiplied by how many servings you actually use in a day.
Step two is the one almost nobody does, and it is the only step that makes two different products comparable. A cheap serving of a low sodium product is not cheap. It just means you buy more servings. Cost per gram of sodium collapses that difference into one figure.
Our numbers, worked out
A serving is a packaging unit, not a dose. Nothing on this page is a recommendation about how much sodium to take. Published guidance on sodium intake for people with POTS varies widely between sources and is not even stated in the same units from one document to the next, which is a bigger problem than it sounds. We laid that out separately in how much sodium doctors recommend for POTS. Your number is a conversation with your clinician, not something to take from a shopping guide.
These are the list prices on saltivate.com as of July 2026. Every product below has the same formula in it, 800 mg sodium, 240 mg potassium and 60 mg magnesium per serving.
| Format | Price | Servings | Cost per serving | Cost per gram of sodium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raw Unflavored jar, 90 servings | $39.99 | 90 | $0.44 | $0.56 |
| Flavored jar, 45 servings | $36.99 | 45 | $0.82 | $1.03 |
| Raw Unflavored packets, 45 count | $39.99 | 45 | $0.89 | $1.11 |
| Flavored stick packs, 30 count | $39.99 | 30 | $1.33 | $1.67 |
| Raw Unflavored, 8 count trial | $9.99 | 8 | $1.25 | $1.56 |
Two things fall straight out of that table.
The first is that the spread between our cheapest and most expensive way to buy the same formula is three to one. Nothing about the powder changes. You are paying for a single serve wrapper, and for the packaging line that fills and seals it.
The second is that unflavored bulk is the floor. It skips the flavor system and the sweetener, so more of the jar is the part you came for. A serving of Raw Unflavored is about 3 g of powder against about 6 g for flavored, which is why 90 servings fit in the same jar that holds 45.
What that means per month
Multiply the cost per serving by servings per day and by 30. The rows below are arithmetic for one, two or three servings so you can find your own line. They are not a suggestion about how many servings to take, which remains a question for your clinician.
| Servings a day | Unflavored jar | 45ct packets | Flavored 30ct sticks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $13 | $27 | $40 |
| 2 | $27 | $53 | $80 |
| 3 | $40 | $80 | $120 |
At two servings a day, choosing the bulk unflavored jar over flavored sticks is a difference of about $53 a month, or a bit over $600 a year, for the same sodium. That is a real amount of money for two products whose formula is identical.
Prices move. Subscriptions, multi jar pricing and promotions all change the per serving figure, so run the arithmetic on the price you actually pay at checkout rather than the one printed here. Current pricing for every size sits on the electrolyte powders collection.
Where salt in food fits
Plain table salt is cheaper per gram of sodium than packaged electrolyte products, ours included, by a wide margin. A canister costs a couple of dollars and contains more sodium than most people will get through in months. If cost per gram of sodium were the only criterion, the answer would be a salt shaker and nothing else.
Two honest caveats. Salt and sodium are not the same thing: salt is roughly 40% sodium by weight, so the mass of salt is about two and a half times the mass of the sodium in it, and mixing the two up is the single most common error in this whole subject. Use the salt to sodium converter rather than eyeballing it. And salt on its own gives you sodium only, with no potassium or magnesium, in a form a lot of people find hard to keep taking day after day once the novelty of salty broth wears off.
Most people who do this long term end up mixing the two, using food and salt for part of it and a measured product for the part they want to be exact and repeatable. There is a practical guide to that split in how to reach a high sodium target without hating it.
The cheapest routine that you will actually keep
Cost per gram of sodium is a real number, but it is not the only one. The cheapest option you abandon in three weeks costs more than the slightly dearer one you keep using.
A structure that tends to hold up:
- Bulk jar as the base. It is the lowest cost per gram of sodium and it covers the servings you take at home, where nobody is watching you measure a scoop.
- A small number of sticks for leaving the house. Sticks are worth their premium on the days you are out, at an appointment, or too flattened to measure anything. Buying them for every serving is where the money goes.
- Unflavored where salt already belongs. Unflavored powder goes into soup, broth, tomato juice or anything savory. One serving carries about 2 g of salt, so it noticeably seasons what you put it in. It will taste salty, which is fine if you have chosen something that wanted salt anyway.
- Buy on price per gram of sodium, not price per box. A $19.99 box is not cheaper than a $39.99 jar if it holds a fifth of the sodium.
If you want to compare us against other brands on specification rather than on price, that lives on our comparison page.
The number on the label has to be true
Cost per gram of sodium only means anything if the sodium in the jar matches the sodium on the label. We use third party testing and publish results by lot on our lab results page, so the denominator in that calculation is something you can check rather than something you take our word for.
Paying for it
Saltivate is directly HSA and FSA eligible, which means you can pay for it with the card at checkout, with no letter of medical necessity involved. The mechanics are on the HSA and FSA eligibility page. For a lot of people this is the single biggest change to what a daily routine costs out of pocket, and it is worth two minutes of reading before your next order.
Before you optimize the cost
Getting the price down is only worth doing if raising sodium is the right thing for you at all, and that is a clinician decision rather than a budgeting one. Some people should not increase sodium, and the reasons are specific. That is covered in when more sodium is not right for you.
For the wider picture on how electrolytes fit alongside fluids and the rest of a routine, start with our page on electrolytes and POTS.
