Kitchen, cost per cup
Cost per cup: pods, beans, instant and the shop
The cheapest real cup on this page comes out of the most expensive machine, which is why this comparison is worth doing properly rather than by instinct. Everything turns on how many cups your household gets through before the machine has paid for itself.
Some links on this page are affiliate links, which earn us a commission if you buy. It costs you nothing extra, and it never changes which option comes out cheapest here, because the ranking is arithmetic. How this works.
The ranking
At home the spread runs from 9.54p to 39.1p a cup. Buying one out costs £3.60, more than all four home methods added together, which is the only uncontroversial finding on this page.
| Option | Running | Cost per cup | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instant2g from a £8.50 200g jar | 9.54p | 9.54p | |
| Cafetiere15g from a £6 500g bag | 19p | 19.5p | |
| Bean to cup machine8g from a £17.50 1kg bag | 14.8p | 29.5p | |
| Capsule machineone branded capsule at 35p | 35.5p | 39.1p | |
| Bought from a shopa medium flat white | £3.60 | £3.60 |
Instant wins on cost and always will, because it has no machine to pay for and uses a fifth of the coffee by weight. If price were the only thing anyone cared about this article would end here and everybody would drink instant.
The expensive machine makes the cheap coffee
A bean to cup machine costs about six times what a capsule machine costs and produces a cup for less than half the price. The reason is the coffee, not the machine: 8g of beans out of a kilo bag costs 14p, and a capsule holding roughly 5g costs 35.5p. That is about 1.75p a gram against 7p a gram for the same substance, four times the price by weight.
That gap is what has to pay back the machine, and it is smaller than the machine is. At two cups a day the bean to cup machine takes longer to overtake the capsule machine than it is assumed to last. At six cups a day it wins comfortably inside three years.
This is the number machine reviews never give you. Bean to cup only beats capsules if your household drinks a lot of coffee, every day, for years. For two people having one cup each in the morning the capsule machine is genuinely the cheaper choice across the life of both machines, which is not the answer anybody expects.
What the capsule price is buying
Consistency and the absence of decisions. A capsule is pre-dosed, pre-ground and sealed, so it cannot be stale, badly ground or wrongly weighed, and it makes the same cup on the worst morning of your life. A bag of beans will make you a better cup and also a worse one, depending on how much attention you were paying.
The one that beats almost everything and nobody buys
A cafetiere costs £25, lasts effectively forever and makes real coffee for 19.5p a cup. It loses on convenience and on washing up. It is second cheapest on the list and by a distance the cheapest way to drink coffee that started as a bean, and almost nobody chooses it.
The verdict
One or two cups a day, buy a capsule machine or a cafetiere and stop reading bean to cup reviews, because you will not drink enough to pay one back. Four or more cups a day and the expensive machine becomes the cheap one. And if you buy a coffee out every working day, that is about £840 a year, which is more than any machine on this page costs.
Put your own numbers in
Prefilled with a capsule machine. Change the capsule price or the machine price and watch which way it tips.
Cost per meal
Set the purchase price to zero for the running cost alone.
Questions
What is the cheapest way to make coffee at home?
Instant, at 9.54p a cup, because there is no machine to pay for and it uses a fraction of the coffee by weight. The cheapest way to drink real coffee is a cafetiere.
Are coffee pods expensive?
Per gram of coffee, yes. A branded capsule holds about 5g and costs 35p, which is 7p a gram, against about 1.75p a gram for beans bought in a kilo bag. Per cup the gap is much smaller, because a capsule uses a third of the coffee a cafetiere does.
Why are some coffee capsules more expensive than others?
Four things, in roughly the order they matter. The system: capsules for a closed system with no third party compatibles cost more than ones for an open system, because nothing undercuts them. Branded against supermarket compatible: a compatible capsule for the same machine is routinely half the price of the original. The coffee itself: single origin and speciality grades carry a real premium over commodity blends, though it is smaller than the branding premium. And pack size, where buying a sleeve at a time costs noticeably more per capsule than a bulk order. Decaf and limited editions usually sit at the top of a range. At 35p a branded capsule is 39.1p a cup; a compatible at half that takes the cup closer to a cafetiere's 19.5p.
Is a bean to cup machine worth it?
Only at volume. It makes a cup for 29.5p against 39.1p from capsules, so at two cups a day a £750 machine does not pay back inside its likely life. At six cups a day it pays back in about three years.
How much does a cup of coffee cost to make at home?
Between 9.54p and 39.1p depending on the method, including the machine divided across its life. A shop bought flat white is £3.60.
Does the electricity matter for coffee?
Almost not at all. Boiling one mug of water costs about a penny, and the coffee itself costs between eight and thirty five times that.
Related
- Cost per kilo: what home grown veg really costsWhat it actually costs to grow vegetables at home in the UK, per kilo, once seed, compost and water are counted, against the supermarket price.
- Cost per litre: tap, filter jug and bottled waterWhat a litre of drinking water costs in the UK from the tap, through a filter jug, and out of a bottle. The gap is larger than almost anyone guesses.
- Cost per mile: petrol, diesel and electric in 2026What a mile costs in a petrol, diesel or electric car at August 2026 UK pump and charging prices, fuel only and with depreciation and upkeep included.
More kitchen costs, or read how we work these out.
Prices used on this page
- Electricity, 26.11p per kWh. Ofgem price cap, direct debit, average of England, Scotland and Wales, including 5% VAT.. Ofgem energy price cap unit rates and standing charges. Checked 22 August 2026.