Best Fountain Pens Under $1 Us

[Martolod]

Transparent Fountain Pens Fine Nib Writing Tool 0.5mm Ink Pen Business Supplies

 

Just inked up one of my orders of these, the transparent one. While the nib is indeed stiff as a rusty nail, it is actually very smooth and writes a lovely fine line with a generous ink flow. It's really lovely for a $1 pen. Had fun inking my cheapest pen with my most expensive ink (MB Irish Green)

Edited November 5, 2018 by Martolod

[bob_hayden]

Glad you enjoyed your bargain! We seem to be in the golden age of dollar pens -- or the latest golden age. I remember the Sheaffer Dollar Pen in the USA long ago. Of course then I was making 75 cents an hour,.

[bob_hayden]

Here is another borderline pen in that you will need to get your accountant to determine if its price is under $1. You get a pen and eight blue cartridges for $1.86. If you value to cartridges at 11 cents each, the price of the pen is 98 cents. But before you commit to that let me warn you that the ink in the cartridges is a pale blue. I do not know if it is washable but it certainly looks washed-out or maybe pre-washed. But the pen itself is similar to the various CHREN and AIHAO pens already discussed in this thread starting at Post #6, so I am reviewing it here. It is all plastic but the nib and embellished with cute cartoon characters. Hence the target audience seems to be schoolchildren. In that case the ink is probably pretty much the same as the child sees in school (assuming they see any ink at all). The heading on the eBay listing is

 

8Pcs Blue ink + 1Pcs Fountain Pen ! 0.5mm medium Nib Office student stationery

The brand of the pen is Snowhite. Otherwise the packaging is mostly in Chinese though it and the pen refer to "DODO's Happy Life". The "M" nib is closer to the 0.5mm listed. It writes very well -- perhaps the best of these toy pens, and better than many a more expensive pen right out of the box (I mean blister pack). The supplied cartridges look to have a Hero 359 form factor. No converter is provided. Long term I wonder how long the plastic clip will last, and the cap is held on by the same bumps snapping over a ring that has led to cracked caps in the Jinhao 991. But then nothing you give to children has much of a life expectancy anyway. Highly recommended for the cartoon character set. Now if we could only get them to do one in ghosts for Amberlea...

[bob_hayden]

Re #81

 

I bought the blue pen back when you first mentioned it and have been pretty happy with it. Smooth and wet. So then I ordered an orange one and that required lots of work with Micro-Mesh. It has a gold colored trim ring between the section and barrel that falls off whenever you separate the two. The blue one does not have that but it could just mean it fell off and got lost. Fortunately, the pen looks fine without it. There are no gold bands printed around the open end of the cap as on the original 78G, but I count that a blessing as those wore off and looked really tacky in the process.

[Restored]

I just bought 8 Jinhao 992's for less than $8 on Amazon with a Wikibuy coupon.

[bob_hayden]

Back in December 2018 I got and reviewed (Post #83 in this thread) a Snow White pen with which I was pretty happy. I think those became scarce on eBay and I just forgot about it until I saw several such pen/cartridge combos in late April at even lower prices. I thought I would dig out the first one I bought and refresh my memory. It turned out it was still inked and wrote instantly after sitting around for four months! So I ordered four more. Searching eBay for

 

1Pcs Fountain Pen 0.5mm medium Nib

will bring them up though you will also get a lot of false positives so check the photos to make sure you are getting a genuine Snow White pen. Look in the top right corner, on the pen's clip; and on the back of the ink cartridge package. I paid $1.40 US per package containing a pen and 6 to 8 cartridges. The cartridges are big bore Chinese. No converters were included but the four new ones now all have converters in them from inventory. They seem to like the Chinese ones with rest twisties -- I think those are from Yiren. One pen also came with what I took to be an alternate barrel that makes the pen very short -- too short for a converter.

 

The reason you want Snow White and not some expensive imitation is that of the five pens two had outstanding nibs and two had good nibs. The fifth was in a pen filled with Herbin Bleu Pervenche and that combination had a strange and unpleasant feel and showed some feathering on the cheap loose leaf filler paper I used. (The other four pens did not have these problems.) So I tried that pen on three other papers and it was outstanding on all of them and showed no feathering.

 

If you are tired of paying $100+ for a pen you have to return for service and that dries out after a month of disuse I suggest you instead buy 75 Snow Whites;-)

[smitbret]

When I started this thread I meant it to include pens that readers could buy for a fixed (non-auction) price under a dollar in quantities of one, including shipping, but I did not spell that out in the initial post. That's a tall order so I am not surprised there are not many posts that really satisfy those conditions.

 

JinHao Shark is pretty much the answer with these stipulations. Weird looking but you didn't ask for best looking. Once the cap is off, it's a pretty great pen.

[panna]

+1 to Dollar pens. I've a grey 717 which mistakenly arrived with a stub nib. Best misorder ever.

[Gloucesterman]

Back in December 2018 I got and reviewed (Post #83 in this thread) a Snow White pen with which I was pretty happy. I think those became scarce on eBay and I just forgot about it until I saw several such pen/cartridge combos in late April at even lower prices. I thought I would dig out the first one I bought and refresh my memory. It turned out it was still inked and wrote instantly after sitting around for four months! So I ordered four more. Searching eBay for

 

1Pcs Fountain Pen 0.5mm medium Nib

will bring them up though you will also get a lot of false positives so check the photos to make sure you are getting a genuine Snow White pen. Look in the top right corner, on the pen's clip; and on the back of the ink cartridge package. I paid $1.40 US per package containing a pen and 6 to 8 cartridges. The cartridges are big bore Chinese. No converters were included but the four new ones now all have converters in them from inventory. They seem to like the Chinese ones with rest twisties -- I think those are from Yiren. One pen also came with what I took to be an alternate barrel that makes the pen very short -- too short for a converter.

 

The reason you want Snow White and not some expensive imitation is that of the five pens two had outstanding nibs and two had good nibs. The fifth was in a pen filled with Herbin Bleu Pervenche and that combination had a strange and unpleasant feel and showed some feathering on the cheap loose leaf filler paper I used. (The other four pens did not have these problems.) So I tried that pen on three other papers and it was outstanding on all of them and showed no feathering.

 

If you are tired of paying $100+ for a pen you have to return for service and that dries out after a month of disuse I suggest you instead buy 75 Snow Whites;-)

Is this one still available? Could not find anything close on the bay... Thank you for frugality-based pen research and reviews!

[bob_hayden]

I could not find any today. The four I ordered most recently were from different listings by the same seller. That seller has nothing up for sale on eBay today but the account is still there and some (positive) feedback arrived today. I wonder if they are on vacation? I don't think I need more of these pens but I was planning to order a mess of the ink cartridges. I don't see those elsewhere, though I do see something similar in different packaging. I have had similar products (but not those currently listed) from two sources, one good, one not.

[DitasVeg]

These Aihao, from Aliexpress, cost little more than 0.50. They have the look and the feel of a disposable cartridge pen, but they are not. Light like a feather, included converter, no ink drying out, no spilling in Work bags and a very decent writing.

Edited July 21, 2019 by DitasVeg

[bob_hayden]

These are still available on eBay in the US of A for 76 cents and up.

[bob_hayden]

Evidently Snowhite still makes one model of fountain pen so the issue is eBay availability.

 

http://www.snowhite.com.cn/view/enproducts.asp?class=FP-1

[bob_hayden]

No activity on this thread for ten months so I thought I would post an update. My Snowwhite pens (and similar looking pens from other sources) continue to write and write without drying out. These are the pens I grab from my pen box if I just want to jot down a note without fighting with the pen to get it writing. They are roughly comparable to the German pens made by Reform and sold in the US at the late Brooks Pharmacy chain for under $10, And these are second only to my Pelikan M200. Everything else is far behind. Unfortunately all these sub-$1 pens seem to have disappeared from eBay. It's hard to say, though. Many were sold in packages with multiple pens and/or ink cartridges with the package going for well over $1 so you do not find them if you search for fountain pens, sort by price, and look at those under $1. What you do find is almost entirely bait and switch listings. These show a nice pen and a nice price but when you open the full listing you find that the nice price is for five blue ink cartridges while the nice pen costs much more. I really think it should be a rule on eBay that the picture and price shown in a search result have to match.

 

The good news is that Jinhao 99x pens are still available for 99 cents US. I just got a blue and a yellow 994 and a clear 991 with a hooded nib. Ordering three pens got me a discount so I paid 89 cents each. All seem to write just fine with no adjustments needed. The 994s were listed as having an F nib and I think this is the default nib for the 99x series. The 991 hooded nib was sold as XF, but I could not see any difference in line width between this and the other two.

 

I ordered the blue 994 because the blue one I had does not post. All my other 991s and 994s (maybe a dozen or so pens) post fine. The new blue barely posts. Not sure why blueness should be associated with postness;-)

[bob_hayden]

Lately I have not been able to find any worthwhile pens under $1.  In fact, I can't find any under $2. How much of that is about pens and how much is about US/China trade policies or postal subsidies I do not know. 

[mitto]

Here in Pakistan I buy almost 5-6 Dollar piston filler pen for $1.