If you make some home-made bokashi, then it would be a little cheaper for you. I live in the country side and we have more feed stores for farms than grocery stores, so I was able to find wheat bran for $14 and I get about 25gal out of it. Anyways, I started mixing bokashi with new soil and it will actually heat up during the cooking process. The soil will cool off in about a week and a half and I've been using it then without problems. You can also topdress with bokashi. Otherwise, you will need to mix 1oz LABS to a gallon of water. I've been buying 32oz of EM1 and expanding it to 5gallons and it really does seem to last a while and I make bokashi 10gal at a time. I even put 10gal of bokashi into my huge worm bin and they LOVED it!!!