Here is some basic nutritional common sense. Eat real food. You know
the kind that we evolved eating over millions of years. Like real meat,
real seafood, real fruits and real vegetables with no excess cooking
and no refining or processing or added chemicals to preserve, enhance
flavours  or colour them.

That way you get all the nutrition that your body needs. Nutrients do
not work best by themselves, one by one. The body best uses nutrients
in complex, natural and wholefood forms. Not in refined, purified and
processed form.

One of the biggest mistake one can make is to over-emphasize one
nutrient in the diet. And to utilize one refined, purified, nutrient to
excess can only cause an imbalance in one way or another. That is not
how the body is designed to get its nutrition.

TC

you're not looking very hard, the first place I looked
(beyond-a-century) offers the monohydrate for under 2 cents a gram.

There are lots of bodybuilding supps with either gobs of
sugar or costly insulin sensitizers etc where you can pay
a lot more per dose.  (my wild guess at what you're pricing)

I don't think these are worth it.  Will Brink (see March 2003
LEF mag article on creatine) says monohydrate absorption is
about 90% (plenty high).  Add your own sugar etc if you feel
you need it (early bodybuilder useage was to mix it into
grape juice).  Some bodybuilders claim they can feel the
difference from sugar.  YMMV.

rather than try I'll give you a couple links that
do a better job than I could in the time I'd give:

http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/creatine.html
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psychology/health_psychology/CreatineSupplement.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/group/hopes/treatmts/ebuffer/j2.html

for more search 'creatine atp' @edu <--- gets rid of supp seller hype.

excessively simplified:
it helps you to exhaustively exercise a muscle by
maintaining a higher cellular energy level.

a reasonable but speculative (I think) claim often made
by bodybuilder supp makers:
since short peptides like creatine are efficiently absorbed and
(at reasonable doses) incorporated into muscle, more of the rest
of your absorbed protein is available to support growth.

sorry, I've gotta insert a health benefit for it:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstra
ct&list_uids=15168891&query_hl=13
Korzun WJ.
Oral creatine supplements lower plasma homocysteine concentrations in
humans.
Clin Lab Sci. 2004 Spring;17(2):102-6.
PMID: 15168891

Unfortunately this is a biochemical topic where, unlike in chemistry,
equations play only a minor role.

Creatine is converted into creatine phosphate in the cell.
This creatine phosphate can act as a phosphate donor and regenerate ADP back
to ATP (ATP is a triphosphate ester of adenosin and acts as the main energy
substrate in the body. ADP is the corresponding diphosphate).
This means it practically provides an "energy buffer" since the ATP
resources in the cell are only very small.

Other systems that act similar are the Glycogen stores via glycolysis and
glucose or other macronutrients via cellular respiration.