Correspondence to Dr Rebecca Williams, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA; rebeccawilliams@unc.edu For the first few years of the vaping epidemic, to draw in smokers, the tobacco industry provided disposable ‘try it and throw it out’ cigalike electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), potentially driven by desire to convince people to try a new product that looked similar to cigarettes with a low initial cost—about the same as (or less than) a pack of cigarettes1; much less than a typical reusable e-cigarette starter kit. ...their availability from online vendors became more scarce and expensive, with the proportion of online vendors selling disposable e-cigarettes dropping from 55.2% in 20131 to 23.6% in 2016 (Williams R. Internet Tobacco Vendors Study, Unpublished Data, 2016), with only 6 of the 98 most popular online vendors selling disposable e-cigarettes in our 2014 purchase study.3 With this shift, vendors often grouped disposables in multipacks or priced them higher than starter kits in an apparent effort to start people with refillable instead of disposable products, encouraging them towards habitual use. Disclaimer The National Cancer Institute had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis and interpretation of the data; preparation, review or approval of the manuscript; nor decision to submit the manuscript for publication.