Lamy Safari - Fountain Pen - saves $24 a year vs a G2 pen

GEAR REVIEW — WRITING

The Slow Math of a Fountain Pen: ~$60 in 20 Months

For someone who fills 5-10 pages of study notes a day, a fountain pen might eventually pay for itself, and it leaves a lot less plastic in the bin.

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5-10

Pages/Day

~4,000

Pages/Bottle

0.5¢

Ink Cost/Page

~20 Months

Break-Even

42

Pilot G2 pens to match

Table of Contents

1. ①Why I Ran the Numbers
2. ②The Cost Per Page
3. ③Against a Gel pen
4. ④Is Four Years Worth the Wait?

Section I

Why I Ran the Numbers

I was curious as I write about 5-10 pages of notes per day, or about 2000 pages per year with my Lamy Safari fountain pen am I also saving money?  

Short answer, yes but the break even point is about 20 months and after that I'm saving about $24 per year; when comparing to a Pilot G2 0.5mm gel pen.

Section II

The Cost Per Page

A 50 mL bottle of Iroshizuku ink runs about $20 and yields about 4,000 pages or 80 pages per mL.  I determined this by measuring how many pages I can write with various pens and they all roughly confirmed this yield.

• Lamy Safari Z28 converter is 0.8mm and yields 64 pages
• Pilot Metropolitan CON-20 is 0.5mm and yields 40 pages

At that yield the ink works out to about 0.5 cents per page.

• 10 pages -- 5 cents
• 40 pages -- 20 cents
• 80 pages -- 40 cents

And as I write about 2000 pages a year, a single bottle of 50 mL ink lasts me at least 2 years.

Section III

Against a Gel pen

The comparison I care about is the Pilot G2 0.5mm, which gets me maybe 80 pages per pen. At $1.35 each, that is about 1.7 cents a page, about 3.4 times the ink cost of the fountain pen.

So in 20 months to achieve 3,400 pages of writing, I would need 42 Pilot G2 pens at a cost of about $57 which is the break even point for 1 bottles of ink + 1 Lamy pen at $60.

Per year, on ink alone I'm saving $24 a year as I need 25 G2 pens to write 2,000 pages and they cost 95 cents more for every 80 pages (25 * $0.95 = ~ $ 23.75).

BY THE NUMBERS

Fountain Pen vs. Pilot G2

Rough figures for roughly 3,400 pages of notes, about twenty months of my writing.

Specification	Lamy Safari + Iroshizuku	Pilot G2 0.5mm
	$40 pen & converter, $20 per 50 mL bottle	$1.35 per pen
PER PAGE
Ink cost only	0.5¢ ↑	~2¢
Pages per refill	~4,000 per bottle ↑	~80 per pen
Cost with the pen included	1.5¢	~2¢
OVER twenty months
Upfront cost	$40 (Lamy Pen + Z28 Converter)	N/A
Total spent	~$60 ↑	~$57
Items to throw away	1 empty bottle ↑	42 pens

Section IV

Is Twenty Months Worth the Wait?

Twenty months is a long time to wait for a payoff.  And honestly, some people wouldn't accept this as a reasonable cost savings.  But from the environmental angle you are saving quite a bit as you don't throw away 42 plastic gel pens, that is a lot of waste.

But once the sunk cost of the Lamy fountain pen is covered the savings per year is quite decent at $24 and covers the cost of buying another Lamy pen every 2 years.