Fluoro-Spec · program economics
The hyperbolic decrease in cost per lead test, as a program scales.
The first home costs what the kit costs. The thousandth home costs almost nothing on top of that, and the curve between the two is what this page is about.
Cost per home = (fixed kit cost) ÷ homes screened + (refill cost per home)
The shape
The fixed costs of a kit (the UV flashlight, the bottle, the branded packaging) get paid once and spread across every home the kit screens. The reagent cost per home (one bottle refilled) is small once you are using the gallon. So the curve drops fast early and flattens into a long tail at the reagent floor.
A program that buys a kit for $50 and uses it for 10 homes is paying about $8.50 per home. The same kit at 500 homes, with refills, costs the program closer to $4.35 per home. Same kit. Same program. The difference is just how many homes it screened.
What drives the curve down
- Refills. The bottle gets refilled from a one-gallon refill at a fraction of the cost of a new kit. Same plastic, same UV light, fresh reagent.
- The UV light is rechargeable and reused indefinitely. One flashlight in a kit can read ten thousand surfaces. The light itself is a fixed cost paid once.
- Branded packaging is a one-time print. Per-test cost of the program's branding approaches zero as tests accumulate.
The asymptote
At enough scale, cost per test approaches the marginal cost of the reagent itself, which is pennies. A program that started at $8.50 per home in the first month ends up at about $4 per home by the time the gear has paid for itself, simply because the gear has paid for itself many times over.
What this means for a budget
Front-load the gear, then plan for cheap refills. Buying the kits is the up-front capital expense. Refilling and reusing them is the operating expense, and it is small. Don't budget a public dust program as if every home buys a new kit. You are buying a small fleet of reusable instruments plus a tank of reagent, and that is what the budget should look like.
This is the model the interactive prevention-model lets you plug program-specific assumptions into. The curve above is the shape behind those numbers.
Numbers in the chart are illustrative of the curve's shape, anchored at the $50 public-health program rate, with the 1-gallon refill at $490. Real per-test cost depends on kit price, refill price, and how many tests the program actually runs. Adjust the prevention-model sliders for your program's specifics.
Order for a program
Program pricing and bulk kits are on the grantees page. For gallon refills or a program order, email eric@detectlead.com.