The Cost of Coffee: Cafe vs Home
There are many reasons to drink coffee in a cafe, mostly convenience and quality. However, you’re paying for it, and if you have a regular habit of going to Starbucks or Blue Bottle or some other cafe, the costs add up throughout the year. So let’s look at the numbers.
The price of espresso/latte varies based on where you live, but the price of coffee drinks add up. Let’s take a look at two coffee drinks (espresso and latte) across two countries. Then let’s compare the cost to doing the same at home where I assume you are using $20/lbs coffee beans, so good coffee presumably.
Also, assume the electrical and water costs at home are minimal. A power hungry espresso machine runs at 1 kilowatt, and if you run that for one hour, you will probably pay around $0.10. You don’t need to run it for that long. For water, you would use at most two cups of water (super cheap).
I’ll also compare coffee in the USA and Italy. Espresso based drinks are popular here, and in Italy, espresso is baked into the culture, so it’s a good baseline.
Simple math tells us that a habit of buying coffee in a cafe is super expensive. So let’s compare that to buying an espresso machine and making coffee at home. I pulled a few machines I’ve been interested in across price ranges, mostly from Whole Latte Love. These machines are a mix of super-automatic, semi-automatic, and manual. This mix gives someone an idea of the price range and the time to break even.
In the table, I have the base cost and then a month to month showing the cost of the machine with the savings to show when one breaks even.
The previous table assumed one latte per day, but what about two? Looks like a machine, even a higher end machine, is paid off within a year, two at most.
Another way to view this data is to ask how many days will it take for you to break even on a machine. In the USA, you break even faster because espresso drinks are seen as a luxury. In Italy, it’s a basic necessity. Even still, an espresso machine is much more cost effective than frequently going to the cafe.
Now, one might argue that the baristas are better at a coffee shop, but that doesn’t mean someone couldn’t learn quick enough for the time investment to be worth the cost. One could argue you’re paying for quick service, but espresso is not like food. The amount of time it takes to make the drink is the same regardless of you being at home or in a cafe. So taking the time to go to a cafe actually costs you more time than doing it at home.
If you have two lattes per day at a coffee shop, just remember, that’s a car payment. You could buy a decent car with that much money.
Anyone can add up these numbers at home to determine the cost effectiveness of making a daily espresso or latte at home instead of the cafe, but because I’ve done this for you, that’ll be $5.
Post script: I started writing this two weeks ago, and I was planning to publish on August 1, so it was interesting that on this day, I saw this cost calculator doing the same calculation in a customized fashion. Good for them!
If you like, follow me on Twitter and YouTube where I post videos of espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
Further readings of mine:
Staccato Espresso: Leveling Up Espresso
The Tale of the Stolen Espresso Machine
Affordable Coffee Grinders: a Comparison
