What a multivitamin costs in South Africa

Multivitamins in South Africa run from roughly R80 to well past R1,000 for a month. That range is wide enough to be useless on its own, because the products inside it are not doing the same job and the packs are not the same size.

There is one calculation that makes them comparable.

Work out the cost per day

Take the price. Divide by the number of daily doses in the pack, not the number of capsules. Those are different numbers whenever a dose is more than one capsule, and that difference is where a lot of apparent value goes to die.

A R180 bottle of 60 capsules looks like sixty days. If the dose is two capsules, it is thirty days, and the real figure is R6.00 a day rather than R3.00.

What the ranges actually contain

• Under R5 a day: usually a single-tablet formula built to a price, with nutrients in their cheapest forms such as magnesium oxide and cyanocobalamin.
• R5 to R15 a day: the pharmacy middle, where forms start to improve unevenly. Some nutrients are upgraded, others are not, and the label is where you find out which.
• Above R15 a day: formulations specified on form rather than cost, usually with a larger dose and a fuller panel.

None of these bands is right or wrong. They are answers to different questions. The mistake is comparing a price from one band to a product from another and concluding something about value.

Where MUTI sits

MUTI DAILY is R549 for a 30-day supply, which is R18.30 a day. The 90-day supply is R1,399, or R15.54 a day. The 180-day supply is R2,629, which works out to R14.61 a day. That last one sits under the R15 line drawn above, which is worth being clear about: the bands describe how a formula was built and priced per bottle, and buying six bottles at once is a discount on the same formula, not a different one.

Those are the prices on the page. Shipping is free on the 90-day and 180-day supplies, so those per-day figures are what you actually pay; a 30-day order adds R100 for delivery, which works out at R21.63 a day rather than R18.30. We say that here rather than at checkout because a per-day number that quietly excludes delivery is exactly the comparison this piece is arguing against. There is no subscription and nothing recurring. A supply length is a length of supply, not a billing plan.

The honest caveat

Cost per day tells you what you are paying. It does not tell you what you are getting, and no single number can. Read it next to the panel, the forms and the dose size, and it becomes useful. Read it alone and it is just a smaller price.