What to charge
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Work out what a bottle costs you to make before you look at what anyone else charges. Almost every hot sauce that fails on margin was priced off a competitor's shelf.
Start from cost, not from the shelf
Per bottle: peppers and produce, vinegar, salt, other ingredients, the bottle, the cap and orifice reducer, the label, the shrink band, the case. Then the batch costs divided by yield: gas or electricity, kitchen rental if you use one, lab testing, and your own time at a real rate.
That number is your floor and it is usually higher than people expect, because a small batch spreads fixed costs over very few bottles. A five-gallon run and a fifty-gallon run of the same recipe have different cost structures, and pricing the first as though it were the second is how a product loses money at every sale.
The four channels pay differently
Direct, at a market or your own site. You keep everything and you pay for it in hours. This is where most small producers make their actual margin.
Wholesale to a shop. They will expect roughly half of shelf price. Your wholesale price has to work at that, which means shelf price is set by your cost times four rather than times two.
Distributor. Another layer taking a cut beneath the retailer, so the arithmetic tightens again. Worth it for reach, and not worth it if your margin cannot absorb two cuts.
Private label or contract. Volume at low margin, and somebody else's name on the bottle.
A price that works direct and fails at wholesale is a common and expensive place to end up, because the first wholesale order feels like success.
What people leave out
Breakage and spoilage. Free samples, which at an expo can be a meaningful fraction of a batch. The cases you give away to get a listing. Freight, which for glass is heavy and is quoted by weight. And the bottles you throw away because a label went on crooked.
Say the inconvenient part: your own labor is a cost even when you do not pay yourself. Leaving it out makes a business look viable that is actually buying you a job at below minimum wage, and you will not find that out until you try to hire someone to do it.
Raising it later
Harder than pricing correctly at the start, particularly with wholesale accounts who have built their own shelf price on yours. Direct customers absorb an increase more easily than buyers do.
If you are unsure, price at the top of what you can defend and discount deliberately. Starting low and climbing is the harder direction to travel.
