On charging twenty-five dollars for a placebo

The most uncomfortable question I get goes like this: if it's inert, why does it cost $25? Why doesn't it cost nothing? Why aren't you just giving it away?

It's the right question. I want to answer it carefully, because the answer is not "because we want your money," even though, yes, also that.

Here is the first part of the answer, the part that sounds like a dodge but isn't. The pill is not the product. The product is a small, designed system: a printed bottle bearing words you chose, a label that takes the practice seriously, a personal ritual page on the web with prompts written for your specific intention, a way to mark a moment twice a day, and a piece of writing on the inside that explains what you're doing and why. The capsule is the anchor for that system. It is the part you can hold. It is the part that has weight in your hand at 7 a.m.

You could absolutely do this without us. You could buy a bottle of microcrystalline cellulose capsules on Amazon for about eight dollars, write your intention on a piece of masking tape, stick it to the bottle, and run the practice yourself. I am being completely sincere when I say this is a fine option. If you do it, it will probably work about as well, and you should keep the seventeen dollars.

The reason most people don't do this is the same reason most people don't make their own bread. It's not that they can't. It's that the act of buying the thing, naming it, having it arrive in a small box with your words printed on a real label, is part of how the thing works. The Whole Foods bottle that fooled me into feeling calmer was doing the same trick — it's just that ours admits it.

Here is the second part of the answer, which is more interesting and more uncomfortable: price changes the effect.

In 2008, Dan Ariely's group ran a study, published in JAMA, in which they gave people identical sugar pills and told one group the pills cost $2.50 each and the other group they cost 10 cents. The expensive pills produced significantly more pain relief. Same pill. Different number on the box. Real measured difference in outcome.

This is awkward for me to write because it sounds like a justification for charging more. To be clear: it is a justification, and it's also one of the genuine findings in the open-label placebo literature, and both of those things can be true. Underpricing the bottle would actively make the practice work less well for the people who buy it. There is a floor below which the ritual stops feeling like a ritual and starts feeling like a gag gift. We've tried to land just above that floor. (Whether $25 is the right number is a real open question — we may move it. If we do, I'll write about why.)

The third part of the answer is the boring operational one. The bottle costs something to make. The label costs something to print. Shipping in the US is not free. The personal ritual page costs server time and a small amount of generation cost per order. We are not getting rich here at our current volume; we are barely getting started.

If, having read all of that, the price still doesn't sit right with you — don't buy it. I mean that. This is not a product for everyone, and the worst outcome would be someone holding a bottle they resent. There is no version of this practice that survives resentment. Take the eight-dollar Amazon route, write your intention on the masking tape, set the alarm. If it works, tell me. I'd love to hear about it.

— Anton