I have been making homemade laundry soap for over 4 years now. I should sit down and figure out how much I have saved over that time (I'm sure I would amaze even myself)! When I started making it, it was on a "need to" basis to save money. My husband had lost his job, and I was trying to save money everywhere I could. My motto is, "Saving money on dumb stuff, so I can spend it on FUN stuff!" My oldest child had suffered with eczema and the only detergent I could use was Tide. I loved it, and loved the smell, but it was expensive. I average 15+ loads of laundry a week so the soap goes fast! I didn't know how this would affect Kaden, but I figured if I needed to, I would wash his clothes separate in tide. I started out making liquid soap 5 gallons at a time for $7-$8. (I will do a post on this later, I really like this for my darks). I loved the soap, and it worked really well. The one thing I really missed was the smell. My favorite smell is "clean laundry" and it was missing that. So I started adding part of a bottle of liquid tide to add the scent. Then I started adding a scoop of oxi clean, and downy unstoppables to each load. When my kids or hubby would do a load of laundry, they weren't as good at remembering to add all the extras. So, I decided to try it out in a powder form and have it all in one mix. (Wow that was a very long explanation on how my soap recipe came about!)