Nothing against Underwood or Siracha in general, so buy what you want but $12 dollars per bottle is crazy, unless this is your favorite thing ever. So many other flavors to discover, and they wont be warehoused for months.
> $12 dollars per bottle is crazy
Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.
It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.
I used to be all-in on Sriracha, used it on everything.
Then, can't remember where, I found out about Gochujang[0] and now it's my go-to fermented chili for everything
Depends on purchasing power, how much sauce you consume, value added/quality - $12 is often not much, cost of two sandwiches, or 4-pack of beer, half price of one lunch meal, 1/3rd of Netflix subscription, etc... What's crazy is $200 plain cotton white t-shirt, but i.e. $150 merino t-shirt isn't that crazy anymore.
That’s twice the price of a similar sized bottle of fancy ketchup and will last you four times as long.
AFAIK physical supermarkets and Costco that carry these usually sell them for $4-5 per 17oz/500g. This is just the classic distribution problem with ethnic foods.