We analyzed the advertised puff counts of 349 disposable vapes and ranked them for honesty. The results weren’t good.

Do you ever get the feeling that the puff counts advertised on today’s disposable vapes seem a bit exaggerated? The manufacturers’ claims were already starting to get a bit ridiculous at the end of 2023 when vapes began to pass the 10,000-puff mark. As we approach the end of 2024, though, manufacturers are now advertising vapes that they claim can deliver up to 40,000 puffs.

Something doesn’t feel right – so we decided to collect some data and determine just how exaggerated the advertised puff counts for today’s disposable vapes have become. In this article, we’ll show you what we’ve found.

• You’re going to learn why you should completely ignore puff counts when shopping for disposable vapes and instead focus on the amount of e-liquid if you want to know how long as device will last.
• You’re going to see the e-liquid capacities and puff counts of nearly 350 disposable vapes made over the past few years.
• You’re going to find out who the most honest manufacturers are in the industry today. You’re also going to learn who the worst exaggerators.

Let’s get right to the data.

E-Liquid Capacities and Puff Counts for 349 Disposable Vapes

We scoured the Internet to find the specifications for 349 disposable vapes that you can buy right now. They’re plotted on the chart below with their e-liquid capacities on the x axis and their advertised puff counts on the y axis. Tap a dot or hover your pointer over it to see the make and model of that vape. It’s a congested chart, but you can scroll down to see a table with all of the source data.

The trendline shows the average performance that manufacturers are currently claiming their vapes to have, which works out to about 767 puffs per ml of e-liquid. That’s already grossly exaggerated – but looking at the outliers, you can see that some brands exaggerate the capabilities of their vapes more than others. Devices highest above the trendline are the worst offenders.

View the Puff Counts for All Disposable Vapes

This table contains all of the data that we gathered to compile the scatter chart above. You can click a column to change the sorting. You can also type any term in the “Search” field to filter the chart.

Why Are Manufacturers Advertising Such High Puff Counts?

How is it that the highest-capacity disposable vapes have quadrupled their puff counts over the past year? Have they quadrupled their e-liquid capacities? No; they haven’t.

Have manufacturers devised a way to use e-liquid more efficiently? No. In fact, today’s disposable vapes have essentially morphed into direct-to-lung vape mods capable of delivering nicotine at an astronomical rate. They consume more e-liquid per puff than ever.

Here’s what’s actually changed about the puff counts of disposable vapes over the past year.

All at once, the manufacturers seem to have realized that no one’s actually going to sit down with a notepad and make a tally mark every time they puff on their vape. Therefore, the manufacturers can say whatever they want as long as the devices seem sufficiently large.

In the past, you could convince yourself that there was some correlation between the amount of e-liquid in a disposable vape and how many puffs that vape delivered. Some manufacturers were even happy to create the impression that they were hooking their devices up to automatic smoking machines to test them.

These days, though, it has become obvious that no such testing is taking place. There’s almost no correlation anymore between the amount of e-liquid in a disposable vape and the vape’s advertised puff count.

Here’s the really laughable thing: This year, several manufacturers have released new vapes that they say deliver more puffs than their previous models – but the new models often contain virtually the same amount of e-liquid or even less.

A few of the worst offenders:

Although we’ve singled out a few brands in this article, what we’re describing is really an industry-wide trend – the advertised puff counts for disposable vapes have almost no connection with reality whatsoever. So, what is the reality?

How Many Puffs Does a Disposable Vape Really Have?

A disposable vape will deliver about 200-300 puffs for every ml of e-liquid it contains assuming a puff length of around one second. If you take longer puffs or have a device with adjustable power, you may get significantly fewer puffs per ml.

Determining exactly how much e-liquid is consumed in a single puff isn’t easy because that depends on how long your puffs are, how much air pressure you use and how much vapor your device produces per puff. However, we can do a bit of extrapolation from this study, which measured the nicotine content of e-cigarette vapor using an automatic smoking machine that puffed on the e-cigarette for four seconds at a time.

• Using an e-liquid with a strength of 14 mg/ml (1.4%), the machine measured 42 micrograms of nicotine in one puff.
• Since the nicotine would have been 1.4% of the vapor “inhaled” by the machine, the total e-liquid content inhaled would have been about 3000 micrograms. That’s 3 milligrams.
• There are 1,000 milligrams in a milliliter, so one milliliter of e-liquid would provide 333 puffs under the conditions used in the study.

It’s important to note that this study was published in 2017. The Blu Plus e-cigarette used in the study is obsolete by today’s standards, and its vapor production would be completely dwarfed by today’s disposable vapes.

On the other hand, most disposable vapes have a nicotine strength of 50 mg/ml. With a nicotine strength that high, it’s unlikely that you’re taking four-second puffs. The increased vapor production and decreased puff lengths probably balance one another out. Therefore, it’s probably fair to expect that you’ll get around 200-300 puffs from a disposable vape for every ml of e-liquid it contains.

Which Disposable Vape Brands Are Most and Least Honest About Their Puff Counts?

So, are any manufacturers actually honest about the puff counts of their disposable vapes? Let’s explore that next. Now that we’ve established a baseline for how many puffs a vape should produce per ml of e-liquid it contains, we can determine a device’s honesty by dividing the advertised puff count by the amount of vape juice in it. We’ll call that the device’s “Honesty Score.” You can find this information in the data table above under the heading “Puffs/ml.” A device with a lower score is more honest, and a device with a higher score is more exaggerated.

Here are the highlights.

Disposable Vapes with Worst Honesty Scores

• Oxbar Magic Maze 2.0 (2,308)
• Adjust MyCool and MyFlavor (2,000)
• Dojo Sphere X (2,000)
• iJoy SD40000 (2,000)
• Pillow Talk IC40000 (2,000)
• South Connect 35K (1,944)
• INR Media Max 40K (1,905)
• Geek Bar Meloso Bar 30K (1,667)
• Merica Bar 20K (1,667)

Of course, the real conundrum here is that the disposable vapes with the worst Honesty Scores also typically contain large amounts of e-liquid – so they do often last longer than the vapes with better Honesty Scores even though their advertised puff counts are nowhere near their real puff counts. So, what does that mean for you?

If Puff Counts Are Useless, What Does It Mean for You?

At the end of the day, if you enjoy using disposable vapes, you should simply buy what you like. It’s important to understand how exaggerated the capabilities of today’s vapes are and buy accordingly, though, because companies are probably not going to become more honest on their own. As long as people continue looking at puff counts as the biggest way to compare different vapes, manufacturers will continue to exaggerate.

One thing is certain – if you want to buy disposable vapes in the most economical way possible, you can ignore the advertised puff counts completely because they mean almost nothing. Instead, compare vapes based on their prices and how much e-liquid they contain. The vape that has the lowest price per ml of vape juice is the one that’s most affordable in the long run. Alternatively, you can just buy whatever you enjoy the most – the choice is yours.

Either way, though, it’s time to stop looking at puff counts when you buy disposable vapes. If you’re concerned that your vapes don’t seem to last as long as advertised, that’s because they don’t – and now you know why.