Which US sauna retailer is actually cheapest? We priced 676 identical products
Haven of Heat has a reputation for low prices. On products where retailers actually differ, it is the most expensive of the seven, 63% of the time.
By David Robison ·
Builds SchvitzHub. Tracks sauna pricing across every US retailer that publishes a catalog.
Ask which sauna retailer is cheapest and you will get an answer based on whichever three tabs someone had open. We can do better, because we match every retailer's catalog on manufacturer part numbers: 1,007 products are carried by more than one US retailer, so for each of those we know exactly who is cheapest and by how much.
The answer is not the one we expected, and it changes depending on how you ask the question — which turns out to be the whole story.
First, throw out the ties
Of those 1,007 cross-listed products, 331 are priced identically everywhere. That is minimum advertised pricing doing its job, and it makes a third of the catalog irrelevant to this question: nobody is cheapest, because everybody is the same.
Include those ties and every retailer looks good. Exclude them and the picture sharpens considerably. The table below covers only the 676 products where retailers genuinely differ.
| Retailer | Products | Cheapest | Most expensive | Avg. above the best price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SaunaKits | 536 | 58% | 36% | 5.9% |
| Select Saunas | 337 | 58% | 28% | 9.5% |
| Sauna Kit Co | 109 | 39% | 26% | 14.0% |
| Northern Saunas | 29 | 34% | 55% | 7.0% |
| Haven of Heat | 605 | 35% | 63% | 15.6% |
| Topture | 205 | 32% | 43% | 9.9% |
| Sauna Place | 5 | 20% | 80% | 11.3% |
Percentages do not sum to 100 because a product can be tied for cheapest with another retailer.
Haven of Heat is not the cheap one
This is the finding that surprised us. Haven of Heat carries the widest range of cross-listed products of any retailer here — 605 of the 676 — and it has a reputation as a discounter. On products where prices actually vary, it is the most expensive of the seven 63% of the time, and it sits an average of 15.6% above the best available price. That is the worst figure in the table.
What is going on is that Haven of Heat is bimodal. It is either the cheapest option or the dearest one, and rarely anything in between — those two buckets account for almost every product it lists. It runs aggressive prices on some lines and full list on others, so a shopper who checks it on one product and finds a bargain will reasonably assume the same holds on the next. It does not.
SaunaKits is the most consistently cheap
SaunaKits is cheapest or tied-cheapest on 58% of the products it carries, and where it is not cheapest, it is only 5.9% above the best price on average. That combination — often best, never far off — is what actually matters if you are buying one thing and do not want to check seven sites.
Select Saunas matches it on hit rate at 58% and is a little further behind when it loses, at 9.5%.
We should be direct about a conflict here: SaunaKits, Select Saunas, Sauna Kit Co and Topture all run affiliate programs, and Haven of Heat and Northern Saunas do not. We earn nothing when we send you to Haven of Heat. The figures above are computed from published prices with no input from any of that — the sort is by price, and there is no commission field anywhere in the calculation — but you should know the shape of the incentive when a table happens to favour the retailers that pay us.
"Cheapest overall" does not mean "cheapest for you"
The averages hide the thing you actually need. SaunaKits is the strongest retailer in the table and is also the single worst place to buy a Harvia Cilindro 9 kW, at $1,625 against $1,318 everywhere else — a 23% premium from the retailer that is cheapest more often than anyone.
Not a paid link — we earn nothing if you buy through it.
Harvia Cilindro PC90E, 9 kW — $1,318 at Select Saunas
So the useful conclusion is not a winner. It is this: on a third of the catalog the price is fixed and the question is meaningless; on the rest, per- retailer reputation is a poor predictor of the price of the specific thing you are buying. Check the model, not the store.
What these figures are
Advertised prices from each retailer's own published catalog on 29 July 2026, matched on manufacturer part numbers so the comparison is between identical units. They exclude freight, which on large items is material and varies by destination, and they are list prices — a retailer may quote lower in a cart or on the phone. Sauna Place and Northern Saunas appear on few enough cross-listed products that their percentages are indicative only. More on our methodology.