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October 16, 2023
Key Takeaways
If you are thinking about designing and creating a custom challenge coin, one of the biggest things you’ll have to think about is cost.
So how much do challenge coins normally cost? In general, the average challenge coin costs around $3.00 - $6.00 per coin. However, challenge coin prices depend on a variety of factors including the size, materials used, coloring, and quantity ordered, so the final coin price may vary drastically.
Designing your own custom challenge coins is a great way to increase unity within a group or make your next special event even more memorable. But before you get started, understanding how much custom challenge coins cost is incredibly important, especially if you’re on a strict budget and want to pay the lowest price. So what does the average challenge coin cost and what are some of the design choices that have the biggest influence over coin price?
The average price of a challenge coin is around $3.00 - $6.00 per coin, however, challenge coin pricing can vary drastically depending on several factors. If you want a more traditional, run of the mill challenge coin, then you’ll probably be able to keep things pretty cheap.
However, customizing your challenge coin design can be a lot of fun and you might not want to restrict what design ideas you come up with based on a small difference in price. In the end, your custom challenge coin is supposed to be exactly what you want it to be, so deciding if your challenge coin design is worth the price is entirely up to personal preference.
The per-coin price of custom challenge coins can be affected by a lot of different factors, so understanding which ones have the biggest influence on coin pricing can help you decide which design decisions are worth the cost to you, and which ones aren’t.
One of the design elements that affects the price of custom challenge coins the most is the size that you choose. Most challenge coins are around 1.5 - 2.0 inches in diameter, however, while military coins often adhere to these industry standards, you certainly don’t have to.
It's not uncommon to see larger coins with a diameter of 3.0 inches, but of course, producing a larger coin requires more materials, and will therefore be more expensive than a more average-sized custom coin with the same design.
There are plenty of benefits to designing larger custom challenge coins, as larger coins have more surface area and more surface area means more space to add custom art, text, or anything else you might want to put on your custom coins.
The materials that you decide to make your custom coins out of will also have a large effect on the final per-coin price. Challenge coins can be made out of and plated with a variety of different metals, some of which are much more expensive than others.
Some of the most popular metals used to make challenge coins are gold, silver, copper, nickel, and bronze. While choosing to make a custom coin out of a precious metal like gold or silver may increase how valuable the coin feels to its owners, it will also be much more expensive than making them out of copper or nickel.
Along the same lines, the challenge coin plating option you choose can also have a big effect on the price per coin. There are tons of challenge coin plating options to choose from with some of the most popular being gold, antique gold, silver, coin antique silver, black nickel, bronze, antique bronze, copper, and antique copper.
Just as before, you can see that the metals used in the coin-plating process vary dramatically in price so you might want to think twice about choosing antique bronze or antique silver when you could achieve a similar look with coin antique copper or black nickel.
The amount and type of coloring that you choose to put on your custom coin can also greatly influence the per-coin price of custom challenge coins. While some custom challenge coins might not feature much color at all and only an organization’s insignia, other custom coins might feature multicolored art to striking effect all over the faces of the coin.
The coloring of your coin is also something you will have to consider when you are thinking about your desired coin size. Larger coins require more enamel to color so naturally coloring a bunch of smaller challenge coins will cost less than coloring an equivalent amount of larger custom coins.
There may also be different paint options to choose from when designing challenge coins like hard and soft enamel or even glow enamel, which as the name implies, can glow in the dark. Die-struck challenge coins are popular too, especially if you just want a bit of contrast on some antique gold challenge coins.
With that in mind, there are options to color one side, both sides, or no sides of your custom coin, so no matter what your budget or coin design preferences, the flexibility of coloring options will help dictate coloration when dealing with whatever budget you have for your custom challenge coins.
Polishing options can also affect the price of your challenge coins. Naturally, high-polish gold and high-polish silver finishes will be much more expensive than plain black metal.
Coin pricing can also be affected by the shape of your coin and the coin edge engraving you choose. Many custom coins have a standard flat edge price that is much lower than some of the other coin edge options, like the oblique line edge, spur edge, or rope edge.
Still, a quality spur edge can really up the wow factor of your custom challenge coin so again deciding whether you want to spend on the higher cut edge price or if you want to skip out on that option is completely up to you.
Custom challenge coins can also come in pretty much any custom shape that you can think of. Round challenge coins are obviously the most common but giving your coin a custom shape can make it more unique and personal.
However, custom shapes also usually tend to cost more than your standard round challenge coin and you might end up paying a higher mold fee than normal to create your custom-shaped challenge coin.
Generally speaking, custom challenge coins, just like any other product, tend to be cheaper when you buy them in bulk. Larger custom challenge coin orders allow the manufacturer to make the coins in as efficient a way as possible while smaller orders may not be big enough to warrant the use of large time-saving machines.
This is where the mold fee will probably come in again as well. Mold fees exist because producing a mold costs the manufacturer time and money, however, if you order enough challenge coins and the mold will be reused enough, it's common that the manufacturer will lower the mold fee or completely waive the mold fees altogether.
One thing you might not think about when designing your challenge coin is the packaging that you want it to come in. Minimal packaging like small plastic bags is by far the cheapest option however if for example, you are presenting military personnel with new military challenge coins you may want more ornate packaging to present the challenge coin in.
This is an important thing to think about beforehand because it is usually left for the end of the challenge coin ordering process and could have a big effect on your final per-coin price.
Though the above-mentioned design choices are the ones that most dramatically affect per-coin price, there are plenty of other design choices to choose from that may or may not affect the price of your challenge coins.
The good thing is most manufacturers allow unlimited revisions, quick turnaround time, and often have professional designers to aid you with free artwork, making the process super straightforward.
Still, finding the right balance between the best price and the best quality so, it's important that no matter where you buy your challenge coins, you make sure that you are aware of all of the different options that could have an effect on the unit price of your challenge coins.
