Somewhere in the archives there's a post where someone priced out their favorite pre-workout gram by gram, and the forum never went back. The numbers get quoted every time a new 'fully loaded' tub drops: 18 ingredients on the average top-100 label, 44.3% of them buried in proprietary blends, beta-alanine at 2.0 g when the range everyone cites is 4–6 g.
What follows is the canonical build the community keeps circling back to — the $0.60 base plus its three most-remixed variants. Steal it, scale it, post your tweaks.
The recipes the threads converged on
The $0.60 base
START HERE| Citrulline malate 2:1 | 6 g | $0.30 |
| Beta-alanine | 3.2 g | $0.10 |
| Caffeine anhydrous | 200 mg | $0.07 |
| Creatine monohydrate | 5 g | $0.20 |
≈ $0.67 per serving
Mix in 300–400 ml of water 30 minutes out. This is the community's canonical stack — everything in it is evidence-dosed.
Full clinical
STIM| Citrulline malate 2:1 | 8 g | $0.40 |
| Beta-alanine | 3.2 g | $0.10 |
| Caffeine anhydrous | 200–400 mg | $0.10 |
| Creatine monohydrate | 5 g | $0.20 |
| L-Tyrosine | 2 g | $0.20 |
≈ $1.00–1.20 per serving
What the $45 'fully loaded' tubs claim on the front and dilute on the back — at actual studied doses.
Stim-free pump
NON-STIM| L-Citrulline | 6 g | $0.30 |
| Creatine monohydrate | 5 g | $0.20 |
| Glycerol powder | 2 g | $0.05 |
| Taurine | 2 g | $0.10 |
≈ $0.65 per serving
All pump, no ceiling-stare. For evening sessions or caffeine resets. Optional add: agmatine 1–1.5 g.
Loaded nootropic
FOCUS| The $0.60 base | 1 serving | $0.67 |
| Alpha-GPC | 300–600 mg | $0.50 |
| L-Tyrosine | 1–2 g | $0.20 |
| Huperzine A | 200 mcg | $0.15 |
| Rhodiola rosea | 300 mg | $0.40 |
≈ $1.90–2.60 per serving
Still under the $3 'nootropic' tubs — and every dose is on the label because you wrote the label.
Making it drinkable, per the thread
Every recipe-swap thread eventually hits the same post: 'this tastes like battery acid, what do you do.' The consensus answers haven't changed in years — MiO or Crystal Light drops at about $0.16 a drink, or stevia plus citric acid (a squeeze of lemon works) so the tartness hides the sour citrulline and bitter beta-alanine.
And the one rule everyone learns the hard way: buy everything unflavored. Two flavored products layered together taste worse than unflavored — the veterans are unanimous on this.
Batch it or weigh each scoop
Forum consensus: gram-scale ingredients — citrulline, creatine, beta-alanine — are fine to batch-mix in a jar and scoop. The sub-gram stuff, caffeine and huperzine, gets weighed per serving or mixed by geometric dilution: 200 mg in a 500 g tub is a 1:2,500 ratio, and stirring won't homogenize it. The setup guide covers the technique — it's the same post everyone links.
Wisdom from the recipe threads
- Buy the milligram scale before the caffeine — the reverse order is how the cautionary tales start
- Unflavored everything; two flavored layers taste worse than none
- Yes, the beta-alanine tingles — it's the single most-asked question in every recipe thread
- Write your batch math on the jar label; future-you will not remember the ratio
- Post your variant — the canonical stack only exists because someone did