Finish Ultimate 70-pack on Amazon vs Quantum 40-pack at Coles: the family dishwasher maths

A family of four runs the dishwasher about 1.5 times a day on average — once after dinner, plus a half-cycle for the lunchbox containers, school bottles, and the third coffee plunger. That's roughly 550 cycles a year. At 62¢ per cycle for Finish Quantum at Coles, you're spending about $340 a year on dishwasher tablets alone.

I worked through the actual per-cycle cost across pack sizes and retailers, and the answer is unusually clean for a household savings comparison: the bulk Finish Ultimate 70-pack on Amazon Subscribe & Save lands at about 44¢ per cycle — 30% under the supermarket Quantum price. And there's a quirk most people miss: Ultimate is Finish's higher tier above Quantum in the AU lineup. So you're paying less per cycle and getting the better tablet.

The headline comparison

The maths at family scale

Daily cycle counts vary a lot by household. Here's the annual savings at the going 19¢-per-cycle gap, at the cadences I see in real households:

Not life-changing money, but it's a category where the maths is durable — there's no behaviour change required, no new product to trial on a fussy kid, and the switch is set-and-forget. That's the same shape as the bulk-pet-food savings I wrote about in the Pedigree 20kg article: not the biggest single line item, but a quiet annual tax you can stop paying.

Quantum vs Ultimate — the tier upgrade nobody talks about

Finish sells tablets in three main tiers in Australia:

• Powerball Classic — entry tier. Single-action tablets, basic enzyme blend.
• Powerball Quantum — the supermarket workhorse. The 40-pack that lives at the front of the Coles dishwasher aisle.
• Powerball Ultimate — the premium tier. Better grease cutter, glass-care additives, formulated to handle harder water.

CHOICE has tested Finish tablets across tiers in their dishwasher detergent reviews; Ultimate consistently scores higher on baked-on food removal and glass finish than Quantum. So the bulk-pack Amazon comparison is not a like-for-like swap — it's a tier upgrade that also happens to cost less per cycle. The 30% per-cycle saving understates the value if you've got hard water (most of greater Sydney, Adelaide, and parts of Perth) where Quantum visibly leaves spotting that Ultimate doesn't.

One honest caveat: if you live in a very soft-water area (Melbourne and Hobart, broadly) and you mostly run lightly soiled loads, Quantum is genuinely enough — the Ultimate upgrade is largely wasted. The savings still hold, but you can also just buy Quantum 70-packs on Amazon if you're loyal to the formulation.

The 10% Subscribe & Save maths

Amazon AU's standard Subscribe & Save discount on household categories is 10%, with the boosted 15% reserved for the baby category (nappies and wipes — covered in the Huggies bulk nappies article). Dishwasher tablets sit at the standard 10%, so:

• Finish Ultimate 70-pack list: $34 → $0.486/cycle
• With 10% S&S applied: $30.60 → $0.437/cycle (~44¢)
• Coles Quantum 40-pack at typical shelf price: $25 → $0.625/cycle (~63¢)
• Per-cycle saving: ~19¢

You don't need five subscriptions to keep the discount — Amazon AU only requires two active S&S items shipping in the same month for the discount to apply. So pairing dishwasher tablets with one other monthly category (laundry powder, paper towels, tissues) clears the threshold.

Storage and shelf life

A 70-pack lasts a typical family of four about 6-7 weeks (at ~1.5 cycles/day). The tablets keep about 18-24 months as long as the wrapper isn't punctured and the box isn't sitting somewhere humid — under the sink in a Brisbane summer is the worst case; a dry pantry or laundry cupboard is fine.

Set the subscription to ship every 5-6 weeks initially, then adjust once you see how fast you're chewing through it. If a box arrives and you've still got twenty tabs left from the previous shipment, hit "skip next" — better to delay than end up with three unopened boxes wedged behind the toaster.

What about other brands?

The bottom line

1. If you're already using Finish at the supermarket, switching to the Finish Ultimate 70-pack on Amazon Subscribe & Save↗ saves a typical family ~$100/year and upgrades you a tier at the same time.
2. Pair it with one other monthly S&S item (laundry powder, tissues, paper towels) to keep the 10% discount active.
3. Watch the Coles/Woolies catalogue for half-price specials on the Quantum 40-pack — when they hit, the supermarket genuinely wins for that fortnight.
4. If absolute cheapest is the priority and you've got an Aldi nearby, Aldi Logix is the flat winner at ~25¢/cycle.

For the wider story on which household categories make S&S worth it and which don't, see the Subscribe & Save pillar guide. And for the same-bulk-vs-supermarket maths in a different category, the Aldi vs Amazon comparison is the closest sibling article.