Depends a lot on your alternate sources. If you have a local source of wood, epoxy and the other stuff you need and you live a long way from Annapolis, you could save a significant amount  on shipping by buying the plans from CLC and everything else locally.

If you're buying everything from CLC, kit or plans, you'd be saving the cost of CLC's labor, but you may be paying more for shipping entire panels of plywood instead of the smaller pieces in a kit.

Best case with CLC is if you live within easy driving distance and can just pick up your stuff in the store. In that case it becomes a question of your unpaid skilled labor rates vs. CLC's paid skilled labor and mechanized labor (CNC machine) rates. If you count what it costs vs. what you're paying, they come out pretty close to equal, with the enjoyment of the build process being the biggest deciding factor. If you can't enjoy it because of lack of skill or time, the kit options will probably win.

Have fun,

Laszlo

  I've built multiple copies of most boat plans I've bought, so I've always made ply templates so I could have near-cnc like duplicate parts. This saves a lot of money over buying kits.

Noah's Marine ships okoume ply pretty inexpensively, around $100 for a couple boats' worth of plywood as I recall. They're current 4mm okoume price is under $50/sheet vs. clc's $67/sheet. If you're in the PDX area as your name implies, you can possibly find a local marine plywood vendor.

And once you wean yourself from clc's convenient one stop shopping, you can look around and find better pricing for glass and epoxy at places like us composites or raka. I really like clc as a place for boat plans, but their boutique pricing for supplies is pretty close to movie theater popcorn...

All that said, you're building a wherry which has a bunch of small and fiddly parts. You'll spend a LOT of time laying out all those strakes (imo full size plans don't make it much easier to lay out large parts), so if you're building just one I'd consider the wood parts option from clc.

   Kit....... no layout (alignment), no cutting, some sanding to fit......plus the rest of it

Scratch.......Qty take off verification,  pricing, ordering,  all the waste CLC would have had plus your "miscalculations", all the layout, cutting, sanding to fix the cutting of straight lines, all the rest of the sanding, alignment.....then the rest of it. 

How much is your time and skills worth? 

   I can't afford the shipping for a kit - I live in Turkey so it's all scratch building from plans for me. There's a lot of pleasure from scratch building I think.

You need to be able to cut scarph joints.  ;)

Not to be a total stick in the mud about this, but as a writer and artist I take the morality of intellectual property serioiusly. If people make copies of my work without paying for them (whether the copies are for their own use or they are selling them), I pretty much regard that as stealing bread off my table. So, when I buy a boat kit or plans, I take that as a license to build exactly one boat. If I want to make templates for another identical boat, I feel obligated to buy plans or pay a licensing fee for that additional boat. I do not feel entitled to enjoy the fruits of another person's labor and creativity withoput paying for it. But that's just me, and that's what I am comrfortable with.   

Jim,

CLC indeed has a multi-build license policy that for a modest fee lets one build multiple boats without having to buy a new set of plans for each. So people who use templates can be perfectly legal and ethical. We shouldn't assume they are otherwise without proof (says so in our Constitution).

Laszlo

   Hah, indeed, clc is due an additional build fee for each boat after the first. I am very careful to pay it before each batch of boats gets built in my shop. I've hosted a couple groups from churches in town, building a handful of boats over the winters, on a nonprofit, shared material cost basis. I'm also careful to let them know where that fee is going, why it's a good thing to pay such a fee, and I show them the invoice clc provides for the fee.

   Thanks everyone! This gives me some good thoughts on which way to go.  

   As long as we're talking cost. Don't fall into the trap of trimming your budget for a build down to the bare bones minimum. There are contingencies for every build. 

I spent a career buiding big buildings and no matter how many times we did the engineering, estimating, purchasing there were "surprises". Same with my builds. 

Sometimes the epoxy flows and the waste is a little more than it should. Ever mix too much?  Sometimes I get something done look at it and decide it needs to be reworked, more materials. It usually happens when there is a deadline and get in a hurry. For example I have a set of hatches that need redoing. 

Figure some contingency budget.  

Having plans built an EP, I can say there are many trade-offs.  I loved the lofting aspect of it but there's definitely a pucker factor after you've cut up hundreds of dollars worth of wood and trying to wrestle it all together.  As it turned out, my parts fit together as perfectly as if they had been CNC'd.  I also made templates for everything just in case.  I figure it will also help me nest parts a bit more efficiently and match grain direction.  The second benefit is when people inevitably stop and ask me about the boat when I'm at the park.  They ogle the boat and are even more blown away when I told them I built it myself from plans.  I've got more pride in building this boat than in a whole house full of furniture. 

BTW, it would be a rare wooden boat builder indeed that not only was dishonest enough to build additional boats without paying the licensing fee for each hull, but also dumb enough to then brag about it in a post on the boat designers forum...

I'm looking forward to the day where I send CLC some moolah for building a second EP or PMD, cause that means I'm building another boat! 

My dream is to help others build their own boats while I'm building one for either myself or a commissioned one.  Thanks for the inspiration!

I'm even going to take my PMD up a notch and attempt to do my own CNC machining of parts based on the PMD plans I've purchased and doing something like this:

I am presently buillding a pair of (let's call them) 13-ft kayaks with plywood I purchased and picked up at CLC in Annapolis. I rented a U-Haul open utility trailer to pick it up, saved A LOT of money on shipping, and didn't have to wait around at home on some random day to accept delivery off a truck either.

A kit wasn't an option for this non-CLC-boat so they are from-plans. I only work about 4-8 hours a week on this: a couple of hours on Sat+Sun and maybe another couple of hours during the week.

I picked up the wood on May 25. I am as certain as can be (true, but hah!) that I will start drilling holes and maybe stitching the panels for the first boat on August 4. If you build on a schedule like mine it might take you 1.5 months (nearly 2.5 months for a pair of boats in my case) to get to where you could have been in 1 day with a kit (just glue the panel puzzle joints together).

I would be $100s ahead compared to what could have been spent on such a kit, but might end up 9 months behind if this project lasts into the cold weather. No complaints on my end: I knew what I was getting myself into.

If you cannot work steady on it, a kit will be done much faster. If you can get the wood without too much trouble, plans are materially cheaper than kit+shipping. To each his own.

p.s. I have bought CLC kits and I should add that CLC kits include more than the pre-cut plywood. There is epoxy, fillers, other good wood for rails, fiberglass, hardware. It is a lot of stuff that is nice to have all together and could be a pain to assemble from other sources.

I would not buy the wood-only kit. For $400 I think it would be better getting the whole thing than trying to source all the other bits yourself. Epoxy ain't cheap and neither is anything else with boats: all of which also need to be shipped.

The Ann. Wherry is a nice boat. Go for it.

   I have always been a scratch builder, or from my own designs.  Cost wise you have huge options when sourcing materials yourself, and over time will save a lot of money over buying boats, or even using kits.  And as others have said, shipping is expensive, and in many cases simply won't be worth it if you live outside the US.

Cost is only one factor though.  Time to me is not that big a deal, the added time building from scratch takes is not wasted if one wants to become a more rounded builder.  And as the saying goes, time is money, so money saved is time saved. 

I think the main issue is what kind of experience you want to have.  One thing one notices in various fields is people often want to build in the most authentic maner possible, as though they were a designer.  And one might think scratch building would be that experience.  But it isn't.  Designers design around their preferences and locally available materials.  On my biggest boat, the designer was in Seattle where the sources are awesome.  System 3, Fisherman's supply (and their discount pricing), Boeing Surplus at the time.  This created huge frustrations for me as many key materials simply were not available to me in Toronto.  Today, if anything, my sourcing problems are worse, stuff is easier to get, but the cost and availability struggle inside US to Outside US has only gotten worse.  A kit cuts through all that.  It is like being a real builder or designer, where the struggle is taken out of the project.  When I design my own projects the experience is so much better (assuming you have 35 years experience), because I design around what I know, and what I can get.  Frustration level is as low as I can get it given how much stuff is still out of reach.  But that is something to consider.  Authentic boat building is like kit building, you have materials at hand, in the forests around your port, or just because you had been at it long enough to have relationships with dozens of suppliers.  If at the end you say you built it, you did it as it would have been done by a pro, without a lot of fuss or agravation.  About the only significant short cut are puzzle joints vs scarfs, but aside from that it is going to be pretty real.  And even there, pros don't worry about processes that are more difficult, they have scarph joints in the bag.  So even at that level the experience will have some symmetry.