Two listings, side by side. One is $50. One is $190. The $50 one looks like the obvious call, and depending on what's behind each number, it might be the worse deal by a wide margin.
Cannabis menus are built out of weight tiers, and weight tiers are where the actual pricing lives. A dollar figure on a product card tells you almost nothing on its own, because it's attached to a quantity that changes from listing to listing and from format to format. Comparing those figures directly is like comparing a 500ml bottle to a 2L one by looking only at the price tag.
There's one calculation that fixes this permanently, it takes about four seconds, and once you're in the habit of running it, menus become genuinely readable. This guide covers how to do it, where the real savings sit, worked examples across flower, vapes, edibles and hash, and — the part most price guides skip — the three situations where price per gram will lead you somewhere stupid.
The Only Calculation You Need
Price ÷ grams = price per gram
That's it. Every comparison in this article is that one line applied to different numbers.
The reason it works is that it strips out the variable that menus use, deliberately or not, to make comparison hard. Once everything is expressed in dollars per gram, a $50 listing and a $190 listing become directly comparable, and the answer is frequently the opposite of what the sticker prices suggest.
The Weight Conversions
You need these to do the division. Canadian cannabis menus run on imperial weights converted to grams, which is why the numbers aren't round.
| Common name | Grams | Also called |
|---|---|---|
| Gram | 1g | Dime, single |
| Eighth | 3.5g | Eighth ounce, 8th |
| Quarter | 7g | Quarter ounce, Q |
| Half | 14g | Half ounce, half O |
| Ounce | 28g | Oz, O, zip |
| Quarter pound | 112g | QP |
| Half pound | 224g | HP |
| Pound | 448g | LB, elbow |
A note on the pound: 16 ounces at 28g each gives 448g. A true imperial pound is 453.6g. Canadian cannabis menus almost universally use the 28g ounce and stack from there, so 448g is the working number. The difference is under 2% and it doesn't change any comparison meaningfully.
Why Bigger Sizes Win, and By How Much
Here's a typical weight ladder for a single strain. The dollar figures are illustrative, the shape is not — this pattern holds across essentially every cannabis menu in Canada.
| Weight | Price | Price per gram | Saving vs eighth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.5g | $35 | $10.00 | — |
| 7g | $60 | $8.57 | 14% |
| 14g | $105 | $7.50 | 25% |
| 28g | $170 | $6.07 | 39% |
| 112g | $550 | $4.91 | 51% |
| 448g | $1,800 | $4.02 | 60% |
Read the third column, not the second. The jump from an eighth to an ounce is the single largest step in that ladder: same product, same quality, 39% less per gram. Nothing changes except how much you bought at once.
That's the whole mechanism behind why experienced buyers stop buying eighths. It isn't loyalty or bravado. It's that the eighth is structurally the most expensive way to buy flower on any menu.
Two Real Examples From This Menu
The $95 ounce. Our OZ Deals $95 and under category does exactly what the name says. At $95 for 28 grams, that's $3.39 per gram. Compare that to a $35 eighth at $10 per gram and you're looking at roughly a third of the price for the same unit of product.
The 16oz bundle. The Insane Rainbow Exotic bundle runs 16 ounces for $1,400. Sixteen ounces is 448 grams, so that's $3.13 per gram — and it's a mixed bundle, meaning you're not committing 448 grams to one strain.
Both of those sit well under what a gram-by-gram buyer pays, and neither required any negotiation. They're just further down the same ladder.
Format Changes the Denominator
Price per gram works cleanly for flower, hash and concentrates. For other formats, the useful unit changes, and using grams anyway produces nonsense.
Vapes: Compare Per Gram of Oil
Our vape categories are sorted by size for exactly this reason: 1g vapes, 2g vapes, 3g vapes and 6g vapes.
Run the same division on the oil weight:
| Size | Example price | Per gram |
|---|---|---|
| 1g | $35 | $35.00 |
| 2g | $55 | $27.50 |
| 3g | $75 | $25.00 |
| 6g | $130 | $21.67 |
Same curve, steeper savings. A 6g disposable at that price is costing you roughly 38% less per gram of oil than a 1g cartridge. Figures are illustrative; run them against current listings in vapes before you buy.
One caution specific to vapes: a 6g disposable is a single device. If it fails or clogs, you've lost six grams rather than one. Cartridges let you replace a single piece. That risk is worth a few dollars per gram to some people, and it's a legitimate reason to pay more.
Edibles: Compare Per 100mg, Not Per Gram
The weight of a gummy is almost entirely sugar and gelatin. Dividing by package weight tells you nothing.
Price ÷ (total THC mg ÷ 100) = price per 100mg
A 600mg package at $25 is $4.17 per 100mg. A 2,000mg package at $60 is $3.00 per 100mg. The second is 28% cheaper per unit of what you're actually buying, even though it costs more than twice as much on the shelf.
This is why our high dose edibles tend to look expensive and price out well. The same caution applies as everywhere: a 2,000mg package is not a serving, and the per-piece figure on the label is the one that matters when you're actually eating one.
Hash and Concentrates: Per Gram, Different Baseline
Hash and concentrates price per gram just like flower, but comparing them to flower per gram is comparing different things. A gram of concentrate at 70% delivers substantially more than a gram of flower at 20%.
If you want a rough cross-format comparison, divide by potency as well:
Price per gram ÷ (THC % ÷ 100) = price per gram of THC
It's crude, and it ignores everything about experience that isn't cannabinoid content. Useful for a sanity check, not for choosing what to actually buy.
Where Per-Gram Thinking Breaks Down
This is the part that separates an honest price guide from a sales pitch for bigger quantities. Price per gram is a tool with three real failure modes.
1. You Have to Actually Smoke It
An ounce at $3.39 a gram is only cheap if you get through it while it's good. Flower degrades: the pungent aroma goes first within weeks, terpenes over months, and dried-out flower burns harsh and loses weight as moisture leaves.
Buying 448 grams at an excellent per-gram price and still working through it eight months later means you paid a great rate for something that isn't the product you bought. Our guide on how to rehydrate dry weed covers what you can and can't fix after the fact.
The honest rule: buy to your actual consumption rate plus a little, not to the best number on the ladder. If you go through 7 grams a month, the ounce is a sensible buy and the quarter pound is not, regardless of what the arithmetic says.
2. Shipping and Minimums Belong in the Maths
We ship tracked mail order across Toronto and the GTA, which means shipping is a real line item that most per-gram calculations ignore.
Add it in. A $35 eighth with a $20 shipping fee is $55 for 3.5 grams, or $15.71 per gram — a 57% increase over the sticker figure. The same $20 spread across a 28g order adds 71 cents per gram. Spread across a 112g order, it's 18 cents.
That's a second, separate reason larger orders price better, and it's one nobody puts on a comparison chart. Check current thresholds on our shipping information page before you build a cart, because clearing a free-shipping threshold can be worth more than a tier upgrade.
3. Grade Is Not Constant Across the Ladder
A $3.39 gram and a $10 gram are frequently not the same product. Our tiers run from AA through AAA and AAAA up to AAAAA+ craft, and the per-gram price tracks that fairly closely.
Comparing per-gram across grades tells you about price, not value. The honest version: compare within a grade to find the best deal, and compare across grades only when you've decided what grade you want.
Our popcorn buds vs shake guide covers the budget tiers specifically, where the per-gram advantage is largest and the trade-offs are most worth understanding.
Running the Comparison in Under a Minute
The practical workflow:
-
Pick your grade first. Decide whether you're shopping craft or value. Comparing across them is noise.
-
Pick your realistic quantity. What you'll actually use in two to three months.
-
Divide price by grams on every candidate. Phone calculator, four seconds each.
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Add shipping, divided across the order. This changes small orders a lot and large orders barely at all.
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Check the bundle and mix-and-match options. Bundles and mix & match frequently beat a single-strain tier at the same weight, and they spread the quantity across strains so you're not committed to one.
-
Check the sales page last. A rotating discount can move a listing several places up the per-gram ranking.
Three listings compared properly takes about a minute and routinely finds a 20 to 40% difference on the same quantity of comparable product.
Where the Best Per-Gram Numbers Live
Across any Canadian menu, including this one, the lowest per-gram figures cluster in the same four places:
Ounce deals. The biggest single step on the ladder. OZ deals at $95 and under is where this starts.
Bulk and wholesale weights. Bulk weed and wholesale tiers, for anyone whose consumption genuinely justifies them.
Compressed formats. Cali Bricks are priced low per gram because compression cuts shipping volume. You trade bag appeal and some aroma for the rate.
Mixed bundles. Bulk pricing without committing the whole quantity to one strain. The 16oz bundle above is the clearest example of this on the menu.
If you want to see the whole ladder in one place, the full flower menu shows every weight tier on each listing, and weed delivery Toronto covers how ordering and shipping work across the city and the GTA.
Frequently Asked Questions
Divide the price by the number of grams. An ounce is 28 grams, so a $95 ounce is $3.39 per gram. An eighth is 3.5 grams, so a $35 eighth is $10 per gram. Running that division on every listing you're comparing is the fastest way to see which is actually cheaper rather than which looks cheaper.
28 grams, by the convention Canadian cannabis menus use. From there a quarter pound is 112g, a half pound is 224g and a pound is 448g. A true imperial pound is 453.6g, but menus stack from the 28g ounce, and the difference is under 2%.
Substantially, yes. On a typical weight ladder, moving from an eighth to an ounce of the same product cuts the per-gram price by roughly 35 to 40%. It's the largest single saving available on most menus. The limit is consumption rate: an ounce is only cheap if you get through it before it dries out.
Because the listing covers several weight tiers, and the displayed range runs from the smallest to the largest. A listing showing $50 to $500 means the cheapest tier costs $50 and the largest costs $500. The per-gram figure at each end is usually very different, and only the per-gram figure is comparable.
No. Most of an edible's weight is sugar, gelatin or chocolate, so grams tell you nothing. Compare by price per 100mg of THC instead: divide the price by the total milligrams, then multiply by 100. A 2,000mg package at $60 is $3 per 100mg, which is better value than a 600mg package at $25.
Considerably, on small orders. A $20 shipping fee on a 3.5g order adds $5.71 per gram, a 57% increase on a $10 gram. The same fee on a 112g order adds 18 cents. Always divide shipping across the order before comparing, and check whether clearing a free-shipping threshold beats a tier upgrade.
The Short Version
Price ÷ grams. That one line makes every menu in the country readable, and it takes four seconds per listing.
Bigger weights win, and the eighth-to-ounce jump is the biggest step on the ladder. Edibles compare per 100mg, not per gram. Shipping goes into the calculation, where it punishes small orders hard and large ones barely at all.
And the limit worth respecting: the best per-gram number on the menu is only a good deal if you'll actually smoke it while it's still good. Buy to what you use, then optimise the rate within that. That order matters, and reversing it is how people end up with a bargain they didn't enjoy.
