Coffee Cost Per Cup Calculator: Beans, Milk and Payback

Coffee at home is cheaper than a cafe by a wide margin, and the interesting number is not the saving per cup but how quickly the equipment pays for itself. Enter your bean price, dose and drink count below and this returns the cost per cup, the monthly and annual spend, and a payback date against whatever you spent on gear.

Bag price, dollars

Bag size

grams ounces pounds

Dose per drink, grams

− +

18 g for a double, 20 to 25 g for a pourover.

Drinks per day

− +

Milk in the drink

None Cortado, 4 oz Flat white, 6 oz Latte, 10 oz

Milk price per gallon, dollars

Cafe price for the same drink

Cost per drink

$0.39

Per month

$23

Doubles per bag

55

What the setup cost, dollars

− +

The three costed builds on this site are $742, $1,230 and $2,847.

Payback against the cafe

About 100 days

Beans and milk only. Water treatment, filters, cleaning products and electricity add roughly $5 to $12 a month and are not included here.

What does a home coffee actually cost?

Beans are almost all of it. An 18 g double from a 1,000 g bag costs the bag price divided by 55, because that is how many doubles are in a bag at that dose. Milk is the second line, and everything else is small enough to round into a monthly figure.

The interesting row is the canned Italian coffee. It looks cheap on the shelf at $15.75 and it is the second most expensive per shot on the list, because the tin holds 250 g rather than a kilogram. Bag size matters more than bag price, which is the single most useful thing this calculator surfaces.

How long does the equipment take to pay for itself?

Payback is the setup cost divided by the saving per drink, multiplied by drinks per day. At two drinks a day, a $5 cafe price and 59 cents at home, the saving is $8.82 a day. The three costed builds on this site pay back as follows.

Payback scales with how many drinks you actually make, not with how good the machine is. That is the honest framing, and it cuts both ways: someone making four drinks a day pays off the expert build faster than someone making one pays off the beginner one. Before using these numbers, count the cafe visits you are genuinely replacing rather than the ones you imagine replacing.

What do the running costs beyond beans come to?

Roughly $5 to $12 a month for a typical home setup. That breaks down as follows, and none of it changes the payback maths much.

• Water treatment. Mineral sticks or filter cartridges, typically $2 to $6 a month depending on hardness and volume. The water hardness calculator will tell you which you need.
• Cleaning. Backflush detergent lasts a very long time per jar, and descaler is a couple of times a year. Call it $2 a month.
• Electricity. Small on a machine used and switched off, meaningful on a boiler machine left on all day. A plug timer is the fix and it also improves the coffee, because a properly warmed machine is more consistent than a cold one.
• Consumable parts. Group gaskets and shower screens on a machine used daily, perhaps once a year on a home machine. Under $2 a month amortised.

Is filter coffee cheaper than espresso at home?

Per drink the difference is smaller than people expect, and it can go the other way. A 1:16 pourover using 20 g of coffee costs more in beans than an 18 g double. What differs is equipment: a dripper, filters and a kettle come to under $150, against roughly $700 for the cheapest sensible espresso setup.

So the payback period on filter gear is a few weeks rather than a few months, and if the only question is money then filter wins outright. The reason people buy espresso equipment anyway is that it makes a drink filter cannot: the milk drinks that make up most of what people actually buy in cafes. If you drink black coffee and the budget is the constraint, start with the pourover setup guide.

One thing carries across both: a good grinder improves every method, and it is the only purchase that does. If you are starting with filter and expect to move to espresso later, buy the grinder first and it will still be the right grinder afterwards. The grinder guide covers what to look for.

Where does the money actually go wrong?

Three places, in order of how much they cost people.

Buying twice. An entry machine bought to test the water, replaced within a year, costs more than buying the right thing once. The budget split calculator exists to prevent the specific version of this where the machine takes the whole budget and the grinder is an afterthought.

Wasted beans. Expect to spend most of the first bag through a new setup on dialling in, which is why a forgiving blend such as Lavazza Super Crema Whole Bean Coffee, 2.2 lb belongs in a first order rather than an expensive single origin. The dial-in guide shortens that considerably.

A scaled machine. A boiler repair costs more than several years of water treatment, and it is entirely preventable. That is the cheapest insurance in this whole calculation, and it is the line people skip first.