What shaving actually costs
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Cartridge razors are sold the way printers are. The handle is cheap because the refills are not, and every few years another blade is added so the ones you already own become the wrong ones.
The numbers
A cartridge refill costs two to five dollars. A double edge blade costs ten to thirty cents. That is not a rounding difference — it is roughly a factor of fifteen.
Shave most days and you will use somewhere around fifty to eighty blades a year either way. In cartridges that is a hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars. In double edge blades it is twenty to forty.
The line that matters is not where each one starts. It is how far apart they are by year five — and that the gap keeps widening for as long as you keep shaving.
The part that is not about money
The double edge format has been made to the same specification for over a century, by dozens of manufacturers, on four continents. Nobody owns it. Nobody can discontinue it. A blade bought this morning fits a razor made in 1935.
Cartridge systems are the opposite by design. Each one is proprietary, each one eventually gets superseded, and when it does the handle you own becomes a paperweight. You are not buying a razor, you are subscribing to one.
What it costs to switch
A razor, once. A sampler pack of blades, which costs very little. That is the whole outlay, and the razor pays for itself within a few months.
Both numbers here are easy to check, which is rather the point. Look up a pack of cartridges and a hundred double edge blades and compare them yourself — we would rather you did that than take our word for it.