That's probably not a fair comparison, there's only 20mg of the active ingredient (Tetraglycine Hydroperiodide) per purifying tablet and has expensive packaging

That's probably not a fair comparison, there's only 20mg of the active ingredient (Tetraglycine Hydroperiodide) per purifying tablet and has expensive packaging and marketing costs. Admittedly, I don't know how much that ingredient costs in bulk, but I bet if an agency wanted to produce it in bulk for widespread water purification, it'd cost a lot less than 50 cents/L