I will def be self-duplicating these, simply because I can do something that takes forever on 3 machines and just chill out. Right now I'm not rushing this and just want to do it correctly. I've found that most of the pre-applied labels/stickers seem to come right off of consumer disks, so I'm not worried about that too much.
It's so weird because I kept thinking that floppydisk.com's prices were a bit off, but looking at it now it's actually not bad. If those are robust disks and I wanted to format these by hand (which might be a good way to weed out bad disks), 50 for 30 keeps the price a bit lower than a dollar per. Additionally, the 500 is optimistic for the full planned run of these so far, the first issue will be 100, so 60 dollars isn't that bad for the first run.
Regarding sleeves, I would absolutely love to get the fibrous older-style sleeves because they're so much more durable, but I really doubt I can find any number of them blank. I'll have to stick with printing on paper sleeves, or whatever I can get my hands on. TBH the more premium I go with this release the more expensive the process is, and while it would be super cool to have these nice touches, a lot of things I'll have to settle on just to keep the cost low and get these out the door. An example would be, yeah I'll make a custom box size that fits 5.25 floppies, but for the 3.5 floppy versions, I'm not going to have another box designed, and if I get an insert designed I MIGHT make the 3.5 floppy fit the insert but if I don't, that's just the way it has to be. I want these to be shelf-able, look similar to one another so they can sit side-by-side and look good, but also be functional. Idunno, I want to make a quality "thing". But trying to find 100% color floppies for each release is extremely overboard, and I feel like finding these specific floppy sleeves is kind of on that same level.
That being said, if anyone knows of, or has, a huge number of those fibrous 5.25 floppy covers in white, please hit me up!