Cost of Snake plant? Money plant cost? What is the real cost of a plant?

How do you put a cost on something that is naturally available to you? It grows in soil, uses water and sunlight, so how is a plant priced then? How do we decide a plant costs Rs. 50 or Rs. 500?

Well, the answer is simple and complicated at the same time. In simple words, a plant's cost is determined by taking into account the number of hours and gardeners it required to grow. That's why a sapling, which takes about a few weeks to nurture, costs significantly lower than a full-grown plant that is nurtured over a number of years.

But how do you quantify it? How do you quantify something that gives a qualitative result? Let's take a money plant, for example. Someone might just have spent as many years as another person to grow it, but one looks lush and beautiful with strong roots, leaves that you can't take your eyes off, while the other looks sub-standard in comparison. So, does the skill of the gardener contribute to the money plant’s cost as well?

The short answer is yes! But with scale, this factor is also impacted; a group of five equally skilled gardeners growing in a space of one acre will give a better yield than five identical gardeners growing in a space of half an acre. We'll dive into the specifics, and I'll justify all the statements above. You’ll just have to continue reading to understand this.

Case in Point: Cost of Snake Plant

Let's take five players in the market: your local nursery, a large nursery, an online retailer like Ugaoo, an online marketplace like Amazon, and us, Idyl.

Local Nursery

Cost of the plant: Rs. 150 - Rs. 599

Number of leaves: 2-6

Quality: Low to medium quality

Key Highlights: Cheap, requires time and patience, haggling skill is a must

Let's say you walk into a local nursery on a weekend, trying to purchase a Snake Plant. You'll find about 5-10 of them kept in front of you. You will examine, call the guy; he'll most probably make you wait given he has two staff members and 6-7 customers at any given point. When he finally comes to you, you ask for a price or if if there is a better quality out at the back that he can give you. He'll tell you the price is Rs. 350, then might go back to check for something better, might find it or might not. Let's say in this scenario he does and comes back with a beautiful 5 leaf snake plant; you fall in love with it, you want this.

You say, "Yeh wala de dijiye."

He says, "Yeh wala toh Rs. 450 ka padega."

Now you want to haggle, but he says, the quality is better, you won't find this anywhere else, etc., and after about 10 mins of haggling and telling him you are a regular, you'll buy more things from him or give him repeat orders, he'll come down to Rs. 400, and you go back home all happy, having saved Rs. 50 at the cost of 2 hours of your life travelling, picking a plant and haggling. Let's say, you would have taken the 3 leaf snake plant home and nurtured it for 2 hours spread over a few months; you would see a 5 leaf snake plant, which you with your haggling skills could have gotten at the rate of Rs. 300.

Did you make the right decision not buying the 3 leaf snake plant? While you ponder on it, let’s look at the next scenario.

Note: Here again, I grow plants every day for my personal use and for my business, so I vouch by the premise without any exaggeration to the numbers.

Online Retailers (Ugaoo, Urvann, and NurseryLive)

Cost of plants: Rs. 139 - Rs. 2,499

Number of leaves: 2-8

Quality: Low to High Quality based on price.

Key Highlights: Expensive, branded, mostly reliable, time-efficient, convenient

Here, you have a variety of options. The plants look amazing. They have products which are professionally shot in a studio; a leafy, green, amazing snake plant is what you see. But here is a fun fact that you already know: while Ugaoo, Urvann, and NurseryLive show you amazing pictures of the plants, not all plants are the same, and it's almost always going to look different from the picture they have used to showcase the plant.

Does this mean they are misleading you? Lying to you? No, obviously not; they are just bound by limitations. They can't list all of their tens of thousands of snake plants and let you pick from them; all they can do is show you a reference image, and there are possibilities that the plant you receive even looks better than the one in the reference image.

Now, coming to the most pertinent question: why is the price on these websites more than the one you see in nurseries? Why are you paying Rs. 800 to Rs. 1,500  extra for a plant? Does the same snake plant cost them more? Well, technically yes.

What these websites offer you is convenience, just like your Swiggy Instamart, where a packet of ghee is Rs. 629 versus a Dmart where the same packet is Rs. 550 because of the overhead costs. And just like Swiggy, it costs money to these companies to provide convenience.

Let’s assume that the cost of the snake plant of identical quality is the same for a small nursery, large nursery, and Ugaoo. But on top of it, there are additional costs that Ugaoo bears that small nurseries don’t.

1. Packaging Cost: They have beautiful packaging, nice pattern design on the box the plant comes in, big bold branding, the pots are also branded with their logo; they get theirs mostly custom-made which adds to the cost.
2. Marketing Cost: Then there is the team's salary with big ad budgets which works to get your attention, i.e., marketers, the exact same thing that I am doing with you right now. But unlike Ugaoo, I don’t use my budget to show up on Instagram or Facebook or Google every time you talk about plants, or even think about them.
3. Delivery and other overheads: On top of all this, there is website maintenance, delivery cost, and transaction cost which Ugaoo will bear. This allows you, with five clicks, to order the snake plant sitting in Delhi, whereas mostly your plant is being shipped from Pune.

So far, we have packaging cost, team cost, delivery cost, and ad cost added on top of the original cost of the Snake plant, making it about 100% more expensive at the least for Ugaoo. A little insight, which is publicly available, to get one average order from you of, let's say, Rs. 700, online platforms like Ugaoo, Urvann, and NurseryLive can spend over Rs. 500 in acquisition cost. And they are not in this for charity so they'll have to make their money back from you, you can do the math now as to why a snake plants costs this much.

Given this, you still buy from these platforms because they maintain their quality to protect the brand image and give you the convenience of ordering from your home, avoiding the traffic, heat, and the "chik-chik" of negotiating with people to get your perfect plant.

I have written a detailed comparison breakdown of the three mentioned companies above, how they are different from one another, and which one you should consider for what reasons if you don’t want to buy from us.

Idyl

Cost of plants: Rs. 200 - Rs. 400

Number of leaves: 4-8

Quality: Superior Quality

Key Highlights: Handpicked superior-quality, trustworthy, always reliable, cost and time efficient

Next, let me talk about us, Idyl. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with adjectives that make us look better than we are or revolutionary in any way; I’ll just tell you the logic behind our pricing and our costs.

There is a sweet spot that we strived to hit where we do not go out of business trying to sell you at prices that compete with small nurseries, neither do we want to loot you with massive prices like other online stores by increasing our overheads. I’ll explain how.

Let’s assume that the cost of the snake plant of identical quality is the same for us as for the other online plant stores, but our price is lower. Why? Are we making less margin, or are we taking a loss for acquiring you? Neither.

We are simply cutting our overheads with the following:

No Packaging:
When you buy a snake plant, what matters more to you: the quality of the plant or the attractiveness of the box it came in? Obviously, it's the quality of the plant. That's why we skip traditional packaging. This approach means our overhead for packaging is virtually nonexistent.

For those of you wondering if this means we send damaged goods without packaging—stop right there! We don’t provide consumer-facing packaging, but we do ensure the plant is securely packaged for transit. We reuse this functional packaging to cut costs.

No Ad Spend:
We're not rushing to grow inorganically. Like a plant, we prefer to grow at our natural pace. This means you won't see ads from us like “Buy Plant at Rs. 39” popping up all over your feeds. Yes, this approach limits our immediate reach. We rely on word-of-mouth and organic ranking on Google to make our way to you. This strategy helps us maintain our costs, allowing us to offer you the best possible prices.

Note: We do run some ads when we receive free credits from platforms like Google or Meta, so please don't flood my inbox with messages saying “I saw your ad”.

Almost No Delivery Cost:
We've managed to deliver 90% of our orders using electric vehicles from our own fleet. This has reduced our logistics costs to almost zero. As we scale, we aim to reach 100% delivery with electric vehicles, further reducing the impact on the cost of our snake plants.

So, why do we cost more than the local nursery then? Because despite optimizing for the above costs, we still have to pay the staff who handpicks each plant for you and perform quality checks, pay for website maintenance, hosting, etc., and the team that brings content like this for you.

Now, let me justify why this extra amount for a snake plant is worth paying vs shopping at a local nursery. One is convenience, obviously, as discussed, a plus point for all online stores, but there are two additional things that we do that no one else does. We bring the offline experience online for you.

PS: They might just start doing it after reading this, but that’s okay; we just want to see more and more plants everywhere, greener cities, and that’s why we don’t mind you buying healthy plants from them either. Just remember where you saw this first.

1. We send pictures prior to delivery so you get what you see. Like we addressed the challenge of listing tens of thousands of snake plants, we can’t do it either; hence, we just send you pictures of the plants before they are out for delivery, which allows you to accept or reject the plant shown to you.
2. We want to make it more convenient for you to buy plants but not take away the experience of buying plants. Hence, we let you negotiate the price you want. The AI-powered bot talks to you, understands our sales for the day, seasonality, etc., to give you a discounted price.

For example, We have a “boney ka concept.” If you are the first order of the day, you’ll get a better discount than if you are the 100th, just like a vendor who says, “Boney ka time hai madam, aap Rs.150 hi mein le lo.”

Just like Ugaoo, Urvann, and NurseryLive, we help you not go out in the heat, deliver superior quality to your doorstep, and save you from dhool, traffic and pasina while handpicking the plants for you, but we do it a little better with the knowledge that we constantly acquire.

Large Nursery

Cost of plants: Rs. 100 - Rs. 999

Number of leaves: 2-8

Quality: Low to high quality based on time spent.

Key Highlights: Cheap, requires time and patience, rude customer service, no personalization

Now, you have entered a large nursery, which has 10-12 staff members, a wide range of snake plants, and you are trying to pick your favorite plant. You are just praying in that clutter you understand what looks good and what has good growth potential, similar to how we have this dilemma with our partners: does s/he look good, or is s/he a good person as well? This is exactly what you need to judge in plants, and that's what is going to take you a long time.

After grappling with these two pertinent questions, you, as a gardening amateur, pick the one which looks good to your eyes. The survival of this plant, though, depends on how well you maintain it and how strong the roots are. Some plants, on the surface, look great, but when taken home and cared for, die within a few weeks. So, it's essential to understand what you are picking and why, for your home or office.

So here, you'll get the right price and a beautiful snake plant, but the only thing you lose is time and expert advice about the growth prospects of the plant.

One more key aspect of large nurseries is service. If you are the kind of person who gets influenced by good service and prefers to buy from people who care about your shopping experience, then large nurseries are the worst option out there. They are borderline rude, given the volumes they deal with.

Marketplace (Amazon and Flipkart)

Cost of plants: Rs. 199 - Rs. 699

Number of leaves: 1-4

Quality: Very low

Highlights: Lack of trust, cheap, not reliable

If you have ordered plants online from a marketplace before, I am sure you are just going to resonate with every word I am going to write here. If you haven’t, you are going to learn a lot.

On marketplaces, the vendors list plants at prices lower than local nurseries as well. Now, how do they do it? Are they producing snake plants on a large scale to cut down their costs? Are they importing from China? Lol, no!

They are lying to you and misleading you, period. They list with photoshopped pictures of amazing-looking plants and price it as low as Rs. 199, but when you receive it, you’ll get a plant that looks nothing like the beautiful, elegant plant you saw online.

Why don’t they care?

Well, one, when you buy from Amazon, you buy because it's Amazon and don’t even look at the vendor’s name, do any research on the vendor, so they get away squeaky clean from brand impact.

Second, because of the price, they are ordered in large quantities. Once they have achieved their mark, nothing is stopping them from starting under a new name and starting this scam all over again.

So yes, the cost is lower because they have low quality plants, and that's why they can sell it to you for cheap.

This is based on my experience and the research we conducted across communities comprising 20,000 plant enthusiasts. We’ll be publishing this study soon, stay tuned. There was a minority that had a good experience on Amazon and Flipkart, but the price point they bought at was very similar to Ugaoo, Urvann, etc.

The presumption is that these are genuine sellers also selling on marketplaces.

I have given you a bunch to think about. I am hoping this makes your decision-making easier when it comes to buying plants, bargaining for the right price, and understanding how a snake plant is priced and what’s the actual cost of it. I hope I have also justified my claims that I made at the beginning of the article.

I’ll be writing articles on the cost of money plant, cost of rose plant, cost of betel leaf plant, cost of rubber plant, too, going forward, so that there is transparency in the market, and this encourages more of you to buy plants and make our cities greener.

Lastly, we’d leave you with Idyl’s motto, “We beleaf in you and we want you to beleaf in our quality and delivery promise.”