Espresso cost per cup calculator
How much does your daily espresso habit actually cost you? Plug in your numbers below and find out when a home machine pays for itself. All calculations run in your browser — nothing is sent to a server.
Calculator
How we calculate it
Everything is plain arithmetic with the assumptions you pick. No regression, no machine learning, no opinions baked in. The formulas:
Cost per home shot
(beans_price_per_lb / 453.6 g) × grams_per_shot + $0.02 electricity + $0.11 maintenance
We use 453.6 grams per pound. Maintenance is $40 per year amortized across ~365 shots, which works out to roughly $0.11 per shot at typical use. If you pull twice as many shots, per-shot maintenance drops accordingly — the calculator does this for you.
Daily, monthly, yearly savings
(cafe_price − home_shot_cost) × shots_per_day is
your daily savings. We multiply by 30.44 for monthly and 365.25 for yearly
to handle leap years and partial months.
Payback period
(machine_price + grinder_price) / monthly_savings, expressed
in months, then formatted as "X years Y months" when greater than a year.
Net savings over N years
(yearly_savings × N) − (machine_price + grinder_price).
Negative values mean you haven't broken even yet within your projection
window.
Default assumptions
- Electricity per shot: $0.02 (about 0.13 kWh at $0.16/kWh).
- Maintenance: $40 per year (descaler, gaskets, water filter).
- One bag of beans = 1 pound = 453.6 grams.
- Same dose used every shot. Most home baristas drift between 17 and 19 grams.
What this calculator doesn't model
Honest list of things that affect the real decision but aren't in the math above. Treat the calculator as a starting point, not a verdict.
- Taste. Home espresso, once dialed in, can match or exceed cafe quality — but it also can be worse for months while you learn. We don't put a dollar value on that.
- Equipment depreciation. If you sell the machine in three years, you'll recover some of the upfront cost. We assume zero resale value, which is conservative.
- Maintenance variance. A Gaggia Classic Pro is cheap to maintain for a decade. A complex dual-boiler with a touchscreen is not. We use a fixed average; high-end machines may exceed it.
- Time investment. Pulling a shot, steaming milk, and cleaning up takes 5 to 10 minutes per session. At minimum wage that's $1 to $2 per drink. We don't subtract that — most people consider it ritual, not labor — but it's worth knowing.
- Cafe substitutes. If skipping the cafe means you switch to drip coffee at home (~$0.30 per cup), savings are smaller than this calculator suggests. We model the "all home espresso" scenario.
- Time value of money. $500 today is worth more than $500 over three years. We ignore inflation and opportunity cost. For payback periods under 18 months this barely matters; for longer windows, shave 5 to 10 percent off the net savings figure.
Frequently asked questions
Does this include the cost of a grinder?
Yes. Espresso quality is bottlenecked by the grinder, so we include a separate grinder slider (default $200). If you already own a capable grinder, slide that input to $0 to model your real upfront cost.
How is electricity estimated?
We use a flat $0.02 per shot. A typical home espresso machine draws 1200 to 1500 watts, but only for ~30 seconds per shot plus some standby idle. At the U.S. average residential rate of about $0.16 per kWh, that lands in the $0.015 to $0.025 range. We round to two cents and call it good — electricity is not the deciding factor in this math.
What about maintenance, descaler, and replacement parts?
We amortize $40 per year ($3.33 per month) to cover descaler, water filters, group head gaskets, and incidental parts. Heavy daily users may spend more; light users less. Major repairs (boilers, pumps, PCBs) are not modeled and can be significant after year 5.
What does the calculator deliberately not model?
Taste improvement is subjective and not modeled. Equipment depreciation, time investment to learn espresso, the social value of going to a cafe, and the time value of money are also excluded. The result is an upper bound on simple cash savings, not a complete life decision.
Why do my numbers look so different from a friend’s?
The biggest swing factors are (1) cafe drink price in your city, (2) how many shots you actually pull per day on average, and (3) the dose. Two shots a day at $6 each in San Francisco hits payback fast; one shot a day at $4 in a small town takes much longer.