Every roll has its worth.
Wischwert compares toilet paper prices fairly — normalized by rolls, sheets and plies instead of pack size. Whether it's a deal on the supermarket shelf or online: you enter the key figures, Wischwert compares them against current, verified Amazon offers.
Why Wischwert?
Since the pandemic, I've had the feeling that toilet paper keeps getting more expensive without being able to really check it. Pack sizes, roll counts, sheet counts and plies differ from brand to brand — an honest price comparison was practically impossible.
That's why I built Wischwert: you simply enter rolls per pack, sheets per roll, plies and the price — whether you're standing in front of the supermarket shelf or browsing online. Optionally you can give it a name, so you can find your entry again later in your history. Wischwert calculates a fair comparison price from this and compares it against current online offers — so you can see immediately whether that supposed shelf bargain really is one. Favorited entries always appear at the top of your list.
What Wischwert does
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Fairly normalized comparison
Price per sheet or price per 100 sheets, ply-normalized — switchable, depending on what matters more to you.
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Separated by ply count
2-, 3- and 4-ply products are compared separately at first — additional ply counts can be added.
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Real, verified offers
All prices come from actual Amazon offers and are carefully checked before being added.
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Your own ranking, no matter the source
Shelf deal or online find — not in the top 10? Wischwert still shows exactly which rank it actually lands on.
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Ad-free for €1.99
A one-time purchase permanently removes banners and interstitials — no subscription.
How to use Wischwert
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Check the ranking
On the right you can see live which toilet paper offers currently perform best — separated by ply count.
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Add your own product
In the app or right here on the page (above) you enter your product and immediately see which rank it actually lands on.
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Ad-free for €1.99
A one-time purchase permanently removes banners and interstitials — no subscription.
The history of toilet paper
Before toilet paper existed, people made do with whatever was at hand: the ancient Romans used a sea sponge on a stick (the so-called tersorium), which was shared and rinsed in a channel of water. In ancient Greece, people used smooth pottery shards or pebbles, and in medieval Europe, depending on region and social status, hay, wool, leaves, moss or corn cobs.
Paper specifically for personal hygiene first appears in China: as early as the 6th century, a scholar of the Sui dynasty is said to have mentioned paper for this purpose, and in the 14th century the Ming dynasty produced specially perfumed, large-format paper sheets for the imperial court — centuries before the rest of the world caught up.
In the US, Joseph Gayetty brought the first commercially packaged toilet paper to market in 1857 — individual, aloe-coated sheets proudly printed with his own name. It wasn't until 1890 that the Scott Paper Company sold toilet paper on a roll as we know it today; perforated sheets, multi-ply paper and ever-softer varieties followed over the course of the 20th century. Where supplies ran short, generations made do with newspaper or old catalogs — a pattern that repeated most recently in 2020, when panic buying at the start of the pandemic left shelves empty. This experience, incidentally, was one of the triggers for Wischwert.
Myths & curiosities about toilet paper
Alongside the documented history, a few anecdotes and legends on the topic also circulate on the internet — not all historically verified, but too good not to tell.
A classic is the story of the three seashells: in the movie "Demolition Man" (1993), a cop from the '90s ends up in a future where nobody uses toilet paper anymore — instead, three seashells. Exactly how they work is never explained in the film, and that's exactly what turned the scene into one of the internet's longest-lived inside jokes: whenever toilet paper runs short somewhere, someone is guaranteed to show up with "the three seashells".
A persistent story also surrounds the American Sears mail-order catalog: on many farms, the old edition is said to have officially ended up in the outhouse as soon as the new one arrived — some even claim the company had later catalogs printed on softer paper on purpose, knowing about this second use. It's not documented, but it endures as a good story.
And then there was 2020: toilet paper briefly became the unofficial currency of lockdown — with photo trophies of entire stockpiled shelves, toilet paper rolls as gift wrapping, and countless memes about who was currently "toilet-paper rich". That, too, has long since become part of the (internet) history of toilet paper.
