Is Whiteboard Paint Cost Effective?

Let's skip the preamble and get to the nitty-gritty cost calculations:

Price Breakdown

Cost of 32 square feet whiteboard paint kit from Thought Formula: $79.99
Lowest price 8 foot by 4 foot whiteboard on Amazon.com: $258.00 (prices range from $258 up to over $700 for a porcelain material board)

Now, we aren't going to pretend that those are the only costs. If you do take the whiteboard paint route you will need a few supplies (although most people will have at least some of this in their home or office). Let's take a look at these additional costs:

• Painting kit (tray, rollers, brush): $6.97
• Painter's tape for masking off area to be painted: $3.53
• Drop cloth for protecting floor / carpet: $2.98

All of these prices were taken from Home Depot at the time of writing. These supplies total up to $13.48.
Anything else we might be missing? Well, most people can skip the drop cloth and use either old newspapers or an old sheet, but we wanted to include it for completeness. However, we do need to add one more thing - shipping. If you order whiteboard paint from Thought Formula we do have to ship it to you and we aren't going to pretend that it doesn't cost us anything! Shipping is a flat fee of $10.

What is the shipping cost for a large whiteboard from Amazon.com? It depends - some of the boards are offered via Amazon Prime and include shipping. Others have additional shipping charges (varies by product). For our price breakdown we'll assume that there is no shipping cost with a traditional whiteboard.

Price Per Square Foot

Now that we have our component prices, let's see how each one works out:
Traditional whiteboard: 32 square feet at a cost of $258 = $8.06 per square foot
Thought Formula whiteboard paint: 32 square feet at a total cost of $103.47 = $3.23 per square foot

Results

It's a pretty clear cost equation - using our whiteboard paint is a great way to save a lot of money when you want to have a large area dry erase surface. The savings and aesthetics really tip in our favor as the sizes get bigger and bigger. Most whiteboards larger than 32 square feet become prohibitively expensive and whiteboard paint really emerges as the clear winner.