Flipping potions
Potions are consumables that cost as much as gear. A four dose prayer potion is worth about the same as sixty nature runes, and you may only buy 2,000 of them every four hours. That combination shapes everything about the category.
Runes taught you a market where the unit is cheap and the limit is huge. Potions are the mirror image. A four dose prayer potion trades in the 8,800 to 9,800 gp band, a super combat potion sits around 12,000, and a divine super combat potion can be 18,000 or more. The buy limit on essentially every finished potion is 2,000 per four hours. You are not short of room to make gold here; you are short of gold to put into it.
Potions are PvM ammunition
Nobody buys a prayer potion to keep it. They buy it because they are about to lose it. Potion demand comes almost entirely from combat, and it is proportional to how much combat is happening in the game at that moment, which makes it the most event driven consumable category there is.
The buyers split into recognisable groups. Raiders and boss farmers burn brews, restores and combat potions by the inventory. Slayer players work through super combat potions and antifire variants. Anyone doing long agility or questing runs buys stamina potions. Ironmen are largely absent from this market on the buy side, since they make their own, but they matter on the supply side not at all, which is a useful asymmetry: potion supply comes from mains who herblore in bulk, and their willingness to keep brewing depends on the margin between herbs and finished potions.
Daily volumes reflect this. Prayer potions and super restores are the heaviest, with over a million four dose units trading in a day. Super combat potions and saradomin brews run in the high hundreds of thousands. Specialist potions such as extended super antifire trade tens of thousands a day, which is still liquid enough to flip but thin enough that you cannot rush.
One more thing separates potions from every category before them: the buyer is usually in a hurry. Someone restocking before a raid is not price shopping across the hour, they are buying an inventory now and getting back to the game. That impatience is what keeps the sell side of a popular potion filling reliably even when the market is quiet, and it is why the spread on a heavily traded potion tends to stay open rather than being competed away entirely.
A 2,000 limit and what it costs
Every finished potion in the common flipping range shares the same four hour buy limit of 2,000. That single fact does more to define the category than anything else, because it turns unit price directly into a capital requirement.
A player with 10M can take a full limit of ranging potions and still have change. The same player cannot take a full limit of prayer potions in one window, let alone divine super combats. So potions are the first category in this track where your bank size genuinely narrows the list of items available to you, rather than just changing how much you make on each. If you have under about 15M, work the cheaper end and treat the expensive potions as something to grow into.
Tax at five figures a unit
At these prices the 2% sales tax is a real number rather than a rounding detail. Selling a prayer potion at 9,300 gp costs 186 gp in tax. Selling a divine super combat at 18,500 costs 370 gp. The under 50 gp exemption you could lean on with cheap runes is irrelevant here, and the 5,000,000 gp cap is far out of reach, so potions pay the straight 2% with no relief at all.
The useful way to hold this is as a percentage headwind. Two points of your gross return disappears on every potion flip. A 3% spread is a 1% flip. A 5% spread is a 3% flip. Since potions rarely offer more than a few percent of spread in calm conditions, the tax often eats between a third and a half of the gross. Work the after tax number before you place anything; the raw gap will flatter you badly in this price band.
The dose ladder
Potions trade in one, two, three and four dose versions, and the market prices each separately. Because players can decant between doses in game, the four versions are linked but not identical, and the gaps between them move around.
Prayer potion (4) around 9,206 gp is 2,302 gp per dose.
Prayer potion (3) around 6,790 gp is 2,263 gp per dose.
Same potion, roughly 2% cheaper per dose in the three dose form on that snapshot.
Two things follow. First, the lower dose versions trade far less: prayer potion (4) does over a million units a day while the (3) does a few hundred thousand and the (1) and (2) do barely ten thousand. Liquidity falls off a cliff below three doses, so a tempting price on a one dose potion is usually a trap rather than an opportunity. Second, the per dose gaps are where the crafting crowd lives, and they close quickly. Treat the dose ladder as context for whether a four dose price is out of line, not as a flip in itself.
A worked prayer potion flip
Prayer potion (4), buy limit 2,000, recent band roughly 8,800 to 9,800 gp.
Buy at 8,900 gp, sell at 9,250 gp. Raw spread 350 gp.
Tax = floor(0.02 × 9,250) = 185 gp. Net per potion = 9,250 − 8,900 − 185 = 165 gp.
Full limit: 2,000 × 165 = 330,000 gp per window, on 17.8M of capital.
Return on capital: about 1.9% per cycle.
Compare that with the nature rune flip in the previous lesson: 72,000 gp on 2.38M of capital, which is about 3%. The potion pays more gold, the rune pays a better rate. Which one you want depends on whether gold or slots is your scarce resource. If you have 200M sitting idle and eight slots, potions deploy it. If you have 5M, potions will simply eat your whole bank on one item, and runes or ammo will serve you better.
What actually moves potion prices
Three forces, in rough order of how often they matter.
- Herb supply passing through. Finished potions are made from herbs and secondaries, so anything that changes herb prices reaches the potion shelf within a day or two. That link is the subject of the next lesson and it is the most reliable causal chain in the whole consumables market.
- Content that changes what people fight. A new raid, a boss rework or a buff to a training method changes which potion is in the inventory. Demand does not increase evenly; it shifts from one potion to another, so a patch that is bullish for brews is often bearish for something else.
- Herblore experience meta. When a potion becomes the best experience per gold to make, players buy the inputs and dump the outputs, which pushes the finished potion down even as the herb goes up. This is the counter-intuitive case, and it catches people out regularly.
The risks worth respecting
The biggest one is capital lock-up. Buying a full limit of an expensive potion can tie up a large share of a mid-sized bank for as long as the sell takes, and potions do not always sell in minutes the way runes do. If the price moves against you while 18M is committed, you are choosing between waiting and taking a loss, and neither is comfortable.
The second is update sensitivity. Potions are the consumable most directly affected by combat balance changes. Read the patch notes on Wednesdays. A single line about prayer drain or antifire duration can reprice a potion by 10% before most players have logged in.
The third is quieter: potion demand has a weekly shape. It rises when people play, which means evenings and weekends, and it sags on weekday mornings. Buying into a Sunday evening peak and trying to sell out on Monday morning is a slow way to lose gold in a category that otherwise behaves well.
Finally, be careful with the specialist end of the shelf. Potions like extended super antifire or anti-venom+ carry the same 2,000 limit and similar unit prices to the popular ones, but they trade a fraction as often. A wide spread on a thin potion is not a gift, it is the market telling you that nobody has quoted the item in a while. If you take one of those flips, take a smaller size than the limit allows and give the sell side room to breathe rather than pricing it as though a million units a day were passing through.
Finding live potion flips
On the Flip Finder, set your capital to what you would genuinely commit to one item, not to your whole bank. Potions are where an honest capital setting matters most, because the tool sizes each position against your figure and then caps it at the buy limit; put in a number you would not really spend and you will get suggestions you cannot act on.
On the Margins board, the arrangement that suits potions is a Buy price filter between roughly 1,000 and 25,000 combined with a Trades an hour floor, then a sort on Margin high to low with a second sort on ROI. The second sort is what breaks ties sensibly across a band where many items clear similar gold. Check the Last buy and Last sell columns before committing on the specialist potions, since a stale quote on a thin item is the classic way to buy something you then cannot sell at the price you assumed.
Potion demand is driven by what people are killing this month, so the pages that tell you about a shift are Market news, where an update that changes a boss or a training method shows up with the items it should move, and Movers, which shows what is actually moving hardest right now. Between them they usually explain a potion whose spread has suddenly widened, and knowing the reason is what tells you whether to take it or wait for it to settle.
Next up: the raw materials that feed everything you just read about. Herbs and secondaries have larger limits, lower unit prices and a supply story driven by farming rather than by combat.
Potion pages to watch
Live prices, volume and buy limits for the potions named above: Prayer potion (4), Saradomin brew (4), Super combat potion (4) and Stamina potion (4).
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