Tool
Cost-per-cup calculator
Beans, milk and consumables per cup, projected to a week and a month, with an optional comparison against what you would pay in a café.
Total per cup
£0.60
Roughly 16 cups per bag, or about £8.40 a week and £36.00 a month at 2 a day.
- Coffee
- £0.60
How this was worked out
Coffee per cup = (bag price ÷ bag weight) × dose
(10 ÷ 250) × 15 = £0.60
Cups per bag = bag weight ÷ dose
250 ÷ 15 = 16 cups
Rounded down — a partial cup at the end of a bag is not a cup.
Exact arithmetic on your numbers
Every price here is whatever you entered — this does not look up or assume current market prices for coffee, milk or equipment.
How it works
Coffee cost is the bag price divided by the bag weight, multiplied by your dose. Milk and consumables are added the same way. The weekly and monthly figures multiply that by how many drinks you make. The café comparison multiplies a price you enter by the same number of drinks and subtracts.
What the inputs mean
- Consumables
- Per-cup items: a paper filter, a pod, a cleaning tablet averaged out. Not the machine.
- Equipment amortisation
- An optional advanced field spreading a purchase over an expected number of uses. It is a much softer estimate than the rest and is kept separate for that reason.
Worked examples
A flat white at home
- Bag £12 / 250 g
- Dose 18 g
- Milk £1.30 / litre
- 150 ml milk
Result: About 86p of beans and 20p of milk, so roughly £1.06 a cup.
Common mistakes
Reading the café comparison as a payback calculation
It compares recurring costs. It does not amortise the machine, the grinder or the accessories unless you enter them in the optional field, and it cannot know how long any of them will last.
Forgetting milk on milk drinks
For a latte, milk is often a larger share of the cost than the coffee.
What the result does not mean
- This is a convenience calculation, not financial advice, and not an investment case for buying equipment.
- A lower cost per cup does not account for the time, the washing-up or the equipment's eventual replacement.
What this does not account for
- Every price is whatever you enter — CoffeeHQ does not look up or assume current market prices.
- Electricity, water and maintenance are not included unless you enter them as a consumable.
- The café comparison assumes you would otherwise have bought the same number of drinks, which is rarely exactly true.