What a Custom Bottle Mould Costs, Part by Part

Every enquiry that starts with a drawing eventually asks the same question: what will the tooling cost? The honest answer depends on four things, and only one of them is the size of the bottle.

This page sets out how we price a mould before we cut steel: the band per part, the multipliers that move it, and the place where a low-cost mould becomes an expensive year.

Part Count Beats Part Size

One body and one cap is a two-mould project. A refill duo, a jar with a dosing insert, or a serum with a collar and a base is four or five. Each part carries its own tool, its own trial and its own tolerance stack, so the budget scales with the count first.

That is why a 30 ml dropper bottle can cost more to tool than a 500 ml shampoo bottle: the small one has a body, a collar, a pipette and a cap; the large one has a body and a closure.

The Band, by Part Size

Small parts — under 50 ml, under 60 mm across — usually sit between USD 1,800 and 3,500 with one cavity. Medium parts, the 50–250 ml band at 60–80 mm, run 3,000 to 6,000. Large parts, or anything with a thick wall and a long cycle, start at 4,500 and reach 9,000.

Cavities multiply rather than add: two cavities are about 1.6 times the single-cavity tool, four cavities about 2.6 times. Below 20,000 pieces a year, one cavity is almost always the right purchase.

The Unscrewing Penalty

A thread on the outside of a neck can be stripped off the core as the part ejects. A thread on the inside of a cap cannot: the core has to rotate out, which means a mechanism, a slower cycle and a more expensive tool.

That single decision adds 30 to 45 % to the affected part. It is also why a two-piece cap — a shell plus a threaded insert — sometimes costs less than a one-piece lid, even though it is an extra mould and an extra assembly step.

Finish, Seal and the Hidden Allowances

Metal finishes are applied after moulding, but they need jigs and masking, which adds roughly USD 250–700 per part. An O-ring groove is free to design and expensive to get wrong: too shallow and the ring is crushed, too deep and it never seals.

A flat gasket needs a land width and a flatness callout that a blow-moulded body cannot hold. This is where a two-hundred-dollar saving on tooling turns into a leak test that fails at the filling line.

What a Four-Part Assembly Looks Like in Numbers

Take a 200 ml pack: a body, an upper section, a collar and a decorative base, all medium parts, one cavity each, with a vacuum-metallised finish on two of them. The band lands near USD 15,000–19,000, and the same parts at two cavities head towards 26,000.

Spread over 5,000 sets, that is roughly USD 3.00–3.80 of tooling per set; over 20,000 sets it falls under a dollar. The tool does not get lower in unit cost — the order gets bigger.

Why Two Factories Quote 3× Apart

A USD 4,000 tool and a USD 12,000 tool can both produce a first sample that looks right. The difference appears at month nine: steel grade, heat treatment, polishing and the number of trial shots the price includes.

low-cost tools are usually cut from softer steel with fewer slides. They run fine for 30,000 shots and start flashing at 80,000. If the product is a one-season launch, that is a rational trade; if it is a repeat line, it is a false saving.

Ask two questions of any tooling quote: which steel, and how many shots is it expected to run? A supplier who cannot answer both has priced the mould as a transaction rather than a tool.

Where the Days Go After T1

First samples come back in 7–10 days. Roughly half pass on the first look; the rest need one of three things: a texture change, a wall adjustment where the part warps, or a thread tweak because the cap runs tight at the end of the stroke.

Each round is 5–7 days and, if steel has to move, several hundred dollars. That is not a defect in the process — it is the process. What we try to remove is the avoidable round: a drawing review that catches the warping risk before the tool is cut.

A tool that runs the expected number of shots, with two or three planned modifications, is a good tool. A tool that needs six is a design that was quoted before it was understood.

What We Need Before the Number Is Firm

A drawing or a 3D file, the thread specification if it exists, the seal type, the finish, and the first-run quantity. Without a drawing we can only quote a band, and a band is a budgeting tool rather than an offer.

Two weeks of drawing review has saved more tooling budget than any negotiation afterwards: a wall reduced from 2.5 mm to 1.8 mm usually looks identical on shelf and cuts both the cycle and the resin.

Questions We Get on This