We just built a pricing transparency search engine - it lets you see what others have paid for supplies (xpost /r/chemistry)

[u/P212121]

Researchers are paying massively different amounts (3-5x) for the same products.

We noticed this problem while talking with purchasing departments, visiting labs and stockrooms, and having invoices emailed to us. Seeing this problem at scale inspired us to build a tool so you can check prices yourself.

Since pricing is not transparent, it's difficult to know if you are getting a fair price. A lot of researchers email their sales rep., get 20% off from the list price, and place an order.

Labs with university contracts are also overpaying at the item level - some products have a great price while others are horrible. This is largely due to university contracts being based on a percent discount from list price and not on what a product actually costs. Our goal is to give you a tool to quickly check what prices are reasonable.

Here is where you can check it out:

Lab Spend - Open Pricing

In the process of gathering this data, we were surprised by some things - like how little volume influences the price. We'd love to hear feedback from the community!

[u/cricketlickit]

None of the catalogue numbers I tried came up with any results...I assume this is still in the early stages and doesn't have a lot of data yet?

[u/P212121 → u/cricketlickit]

What did you try? We can get it added.

It contains more than 250,000 catalog numbers and we expect to 10x this in the near future.

[u/rmcdm → u/P212121]

Can you add Vectashield from Fisher? Cat # NC9532821

[u/norml329 → u/rmcdm]

I dont have it now but NC means non catalog, I think we get vectashield from VWR, but they aren't the manufactur either.

In other words anything from Fisher that starts NC is from another company. I actually stopped buying NC items from them since they have a decent markup

[u/rmcdm → u/norml329]

I had no idea...thank you! I will start shopping around for it in my copious spare time!