In this review
I was standing in a kitchen store last month staring at an OXO scale priced at $55. Same 11 lb capacity as the Etekcity in my cart at home. Same 1 g increments. Same tare button, same LCD, same two-AAA setup. The OXO had a pull-out display and a nicer box.
The gap was $41. I walked out.
The $14 Etekcity kitchen scale (ASIN B0113UZJE2) has 173,094 reviews and a 4.6-star average. That volume alone says something. What I wanted to know, after two years of daily use in my own kitchen and a side-by-side borrow of a friend’s OXO, is whether the budget option actually loses anything that matters. It does not, for most home cooks.
Etekcity Food Kitchen Scale
Compact digital kitchen scale with a 304 stainless steel platform and backlit LCD. Weighs up to 11 lb / 5 kg in 1 g increments. Five units (g, oz, lb:oz, fl oz, mL), tare function, two AAA batteries included. Street price sits around $13.99, drops to $9.99-$11.99 on sale.
Rating Breakdown
Rating breakdown
The Brand Tax on Kitchen Scales
I priced six scales at the same 11 lb / 1 g spec to see what $41 of OXO money actually buys.
| Scale | Price | Capacity | Increments | Tare | Backlit | Pull-out display |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Etekcity (this one) | $13.99 | 11 lb | 1 g | Yes | Yes | No |
| Ozeri Pronto | $12.99 | 11 lb | 1 g | Yes | Yes | No |
| Escali Primo | $28 | 11 lb | 1 g | Yes | No | No |
| Greater Goods Nourish | $30 | 11 lb | 1 g | Yes | Yes | No |
| OXO Good Grips (5 lb) | $55 | 5 lb | 1 g | Yes | No | No |
| OXO 11 lb | $65 | 11 lb | 1 g | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The 11 lb OXO is $51 more than the Etekcity. What you get for that $51: a pull-out display so bigger mixing bowls don’t block the screen, plus a stiffer build and a longer auto-shutoff timer. That’s it.
If you never use a bowl wider than your scale, the pull-out display is a feature you paid for and never use. Mine is 8.25 inches square. Most cake pans and Pyrex bowls clear it.
The brand tax here is about $40. For most people, it’s paying for a logo and a nicer unboxing.
Accuracy on a $14 Scale
The spec sheet says 1 g increments. I tested it against a $20 set of calibration weights (100 g, 200 g, 500 g, 1 kg). Every read landed within 1 g of the stated weight. At 100 g it read 100. At 500 g it read 500. At 1 kg it read 1000.
For baking flour, coffee grounds, yogurt strained overnight, or portioning chicken thighs, 1 g of error at 500 g is 0.2%. That is not the variable that’s going to ruin your bread.
Where I hit friction: at weights under 5 g the readings sometimes wobbled between two values. Weighing a single clove of garlic or a pinch of yeast, the display would flip between 3 and 4 g depending on how I set it down. For most home tasks this is fine. If you’re portioning espresso at single-gram precision, buy a dedicated coffee scale. That’s a different category of tool.
What You Give Up Below $15
Three real compromises, worth knowing about.
Aggressive auto-shutoff. The display times out around two minutes. If you’re mid-pour on a slow sourdough autolyse, the scale will go dark on you. A tap on the platform wakes it and holds the tare. Annoying, not disqualifying.
The buttons feel cheap. Plastic membrane, no tactile click. They work, and in two years mine have never failed. But it’s obvious where the cost got cut.
No pull-out display. A 9-inch mixing bowl will block the screen. I lean forward or tilt the bowl. Not a deal-breaker in a home kitchen, but if you bake with wide pans daily, the OXO’s pull-out tray genuinely helps.
That is the full list. Everything else the Etekcity does about as well as a scale three times the price.
Hidden Costs and Cost Per Use
The Etekcity ships with two AAA batteries. In my use, at about 20 weighings a week, the included batteries lasted roughly 10 months. A four-pack of store-brand AAAs runs $2.50, so battery cost comes out to about $1.25 a year. Call it $14 upfront plus $1.25 a year in batteries.
Over two years of daily use, all-in cost is $16.50. At about 20 weighings a week, that works out to roughly $0.008 per weighing. Less than a penny.
The OXO at $55 plus the same batteries lands at $57.50 over two years, or about $0.028 per weighing. Three-and-a-half times the cost per use for, again, a pull-out display and a heavier feel.
There are no proprietary parts, no subscriptions, no replacement pans to buy. The 304 stainless platform wipes clean with a damp cloth. I’ve dropped mine twice from counter height onto tile. It still reads within 1 g.
Price Tracking and When to Buy
I watched this scale for three months across Amazon. Base price sits at $13.99 most of the time. It drops to $9.99-$11.99 during Prime Day, Black Friday, and random holiday promos. If you’re not in a rush, waiting for a sale saves roughly $3-4. That’s a small gap, and at $14 most people just buy it.
It goes out of stock occasionally in specific colors. The silver is the most reliably available.
When to Spend More
I’ll say it plainly, because the Budget Hunter is not against spending money when the math supports it. There are two scenarios where the OXO or a better scale is worth the gap.
If you are a serious home baker doing multi-hour hydration math on sourdough and you hate the auto-shutoff, the OXO’s longer timeout and pull-out display are real quality-of-life wins. About $40 of quality of life.
If you regularly weigh over 11 lb, think large turkeys or multi-kilo batches for canning, you need a bigger scale entirely. Neither of these is in the running.
For everyone else, which is most people, $14 is the answer.
The Bottom Line
A $14 scale that has survived 173,000 reviews at a 4.6-star average is not an accident. The Etekcity clears the bar on accuracy, runs on batteries you already own, and gets out of the way. Brand tax on the OXO alternative is about $40 and mostly buys you a pull-out display most home cooks won’t need.
If your scale just died and you’re reading this with flour on your hands, buy this one. Spend the $40 you saved on better flour.
For more kitchen gear tested at real price points, browse our full cookware reviews.
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