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I agree with all the reasons listed on this thread, and while I like the reduced cost of reloading, it’s not the major draw for me. The main one is the ability to “customize� my loads.
My rifles all have a different “load� they like. By balancing bullet weight and velocity, I can substantially improve the accuracy of my long guns and still maintain knock down power for hunting or defense. Even if reloading wasn’t cheaper, I would still do it for my rifles just for the accuracy.
My pistols are a different story. To me my pistols are for defense exclusively, and as such reliability is more important then tack driving capability, so I reload pistol for a different reason.
During practice I noticed my wife would do well for the first 15-20 rounds and then her groups would start to expand. By 50 rounds she was having a hard time keeping double taps in Center Of Mass (COM) on the target from ~ 15 ft.
Her choice of weapon is a Kimber CDP (45 ACP), and when using full load defensive rounds it can have a non-negligible kick. Basically, she was developing a flinch. I would have her dry fire and the flinch would go away, but next live fire practice it would come back, and I noticed each time it took less rounds for the flinch to appear. Her desire to live fire practice started declining so things were obviously going in the wrong direction…
Enter reloading as the solution. I down-loaded rounds to the lowest level that would consistently cycle her Kimber. The recoil was substantially reduced, and we could practice literally for hours with no sign of her developing a flinch. To me, the recoil is on the level of a Glock G19 (9mm), actually slightly less. Her accuracy has improved dramatically and so has her speed.
After several sessions with the light loads, to determine if they were have a detrimental effect on her ability to hit with defense power loads, I had her use full power loads at the end of the next session. Accuracy was not impacted at all and her time was only minimally impacted. Of course time from the buzzer to first hit was not impacted at all.
So now when we practice the first and last clips are defense rounds, all others are reloads.
To me the bottom line is she practices more, is more accurate, faster, and much more confident in her ability. All that due to reloading…how do you put a price on that?
My pistol reloads are for practice, competition, and plinking only. For carry I use brand name ammo. While I have excellent success with my reloads, my quality control is probably not as good as say Federal or Winchester and I don’t want to trust my reloads for carry. There’s also the legal issues, if I’m forced to respond to a threat with my firearm, I suspect using factory ammo would play better with a jury then reloads. But this is secondary to the reliability issue (a distant second at that!).