Will making your own coffee really save you money? Let’s break down the cost of coffee today and see if you can put that money back into your pocket.
The last time I went out for coffee, sometime in the summer of 2025, I ordered a small, iced latte. No flavor. No syrups. Nothing fancy.
They wanted me to spend $5 on a small, iced coffee.
I asked myself if two shots of espresso, a cup of milk, and some ice were really worth $5. Could I do better at home?
The prices listed in this post are reflective of October 2025 prices listed online. If you are reading this post beyond 2025, remember that time and region may impact the prices you see in your area. Consider that when you do your own math.
How to Save Money on Coffee (by Making it at Home!)
Let’s crunch the numbers and see if you can truly save money on coffee in the long run by making it yourself.
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Table of Contents
How Much Money Are We Spending on Coffee?
Choosing the Right Coffee Beans
The True Cost of Your Daily Coffee Habit
How Much Money Are We Spending on Coffee?
Here in Arkansas, a quarterly report in 2024 stated a regular cup of coffee (most likely drip coffee) was $2.86. A cup of cold brew was $5.09 and a latte was $5.63 (source).
The reported national average in 2025 for a cup of coffee was $3.52. In places like Hawaii and Seattle, the average was closer to $5.
Why? The tariffs imposed on imports in 2025 and weather were largely to blame for the rising cost. Since coffee needs specific conditions to grow, it’s imperative the weather is right to grow a great crop.
In 2023, a staggering 80 percent of coffee was imported into America.
Importing the coffee itself isn’t the only thing you’re paying for in a cup of coffee. Labor, equipment, and packaging are all other things to consider when you think about the final cost of the product you’re buying.
When we are looking at cutting costs and making coffee at home, we need to consider all of these factors in our final cost breakdown.
Since you are making things at home, you aren’t paying the labor or rent prices that a coffee shop might. You are the labor! And even if you’re renting your apartment, you aren’t paying the fee to the coffee shop to cover their rent prices.
If you aren’t helping them pay their rent, you also aren’t helping them pay for their equipment. Since you own the equipment, you are making an investment in yourself.
Finally, you aren’t paying for disposable, one-use products. Even though they are cents on the dollar. These 16 oz plastic coffee cups are $0.24 per cup – that’s money out of your pocket! If you buy coffee every day you go to your average Monday to Friday job, you’re spending an extra $5 per month on something you’re just throwing away!
Can you imagine spending $60 per year on literal garbage? Try buying $60 worth of reusable coffee travel mugs. Invest in yourself.
Examining Your Brewing Method
The number one critique I hear about homemade coffee is the taste.
“It just isn’t the same when I make it at home!”
My response? You’re going to have to work to perfect your recipes, just like that coffee shop worked to perfect its recipe.
The market for flavor, sugar, syrups, and even the type of ice you can make is way too vast for you not to be able to make a pleasant cup of coffee at home. It’s a learning curve! And we live in an era where means and opportunity are rampant. So take advantage of both!
Find a coffee connoisseur online and start making their recipes. Or, start digging into the world of coffee and figure out what truly works for you. Let’s start with the most popular brewing methods you can recreate at home.
Drip Coffee
Drip Coffee is made using an automatic machine, constant stream of water, and a filter. It’s a cheap way to get in to making your coffee at home!
Drip coffee machines usually have a carafe that sits on a hot plate. You fill a water tank in the back of the machine with water from the carafe, so you know you’re getting the same amount of coffee from the water you put in the tank. You don’t want to overfill the tank!
Next, you place a filter within the machine and load the filter with coffee grounds. The more coffee grounds you put in, the stronger your cup of coffee. The fewer coffee grounds you put in, the weaker your cup of coffee.
Usually, only coffee grounds are placed through the filter.
When you turn your machine on, the machine slowly drips hot water over the coffee grounds. As the water passes through the coffee grounds, it extracts flavor from them and fills the carafe. Because the carafe is on a hot plate, the product stays hot until the carafe is full or you’re ready to drink it.
Drip coffee makers can cost anywhere from $16 (Mainstays brand) to a few hundred dollars.
Espresso
Espresso does have a bit of a learning curve and more equipment than drip coffee. But it does tend to be a more popular method among coffee shops.
Coffee grounds are loaded into a filter in a portaholder, the device with a handle that an espresso machine pumps hot water into. Once the coffee grounds are loaded into the filter, they are distributed with a fine comb to break up lumps that may prohibit the hot water from filtering through the coffee grounds evenly.
The coffee grounds are then pressed with a device called a tamp.
The portaholder is loaded into the espresso machine and hot water is filtered over the coffee grounds, just like in drip coffee. However, espresso shots are limited to a matter of seconds. Sometimes 10 seconds, sometimes 30 seconds.
The espresso fills a small cup and can be transferred to another cup with your milk of choice.
The end product depends on your preference. You can customize your drinks with ice, syrups, sugar, frothed milk, and more. The options are endless!
An espresso coffee machine can cost anywhere from $56 (Mr. Coffee Brand) to almost $600 (Ninja brand).
French Press
French press coffee is similar to drip coffee in that it doesn’t require too many steps. But it’s also similar to tea in that the end product requires your coffee to steep.
A French press coffee maker is loaded with coffee grounds, usually a tablespoon of coffee grounds per cup of water. Pour hot water over your coffee grounds and allow your coffee to steep. Sometimes up to 10 minutes.
Most French press lids have a screen for a filter attached to a plunger. As you plunge through the coffee grounds, the steeped coffee rises through the screen. Thus, you are able to pour your coffee into your mug without the grounds muddying your drink.
A French press coffee machine can run you anywhere from $7 (mini, portable versions) to $100 or so.
Pour Over
Pour-over coffee is similar to espresso in that method matters. But for pour-over coffee, weights and timing are also crucial elements to creating a good cup of coffee.
In a pour-over carafe, you load a filter with measured coffee grounds. To that, you pour measured hot water and allow the water to filter through the coffee grounds, through the filter, and into the bottom of the carafe.
Different baristas will let the coffee bloom for a certain amount of time before adding more water.
Pour-over coffee makers can cost $20 (Amazon brands) to $350 (Williams-Sonoma brand).
Remember – you don’t need a high-quality coffee maker if you are just starting out on this journey. Choose a cheaper model, learn about the coffee-making craft, and invest in a more expensive model down the road.
Choosing the Right Coffee Beans
The coffee beans you choose will impact the way your cup of coffee tastes. How you choose to brew that coffee will also impact the way the coffee tastes.
For example, a drip coffee machine will be a thinner consistency and a slightly blander flavor, but an espresso will be thicker and much more flavorful.
Consider that before selecting the coffee beans you choose!
There is also an impact in grinding your own coffee beans at home over using pre-ground coffee. I chat more about that in this blog post.
I like a traditional espresso, so I opt for a medium to dark roast coffee. But for a French press, I prefer a medium roast. Since the coffee has to steep for a period of time, I don’t want the end result to be too bitter. I want to drink great coffee! So I choose a medium roast over darker roasts for French press coffee.
The True Cost of Your Daily Coffee Habit
Let’s say you buy a small latte every weekday before you head into work. In Arkansas, that would cost you about $5 per day. If you take two weeks of vacation, you’re purchasing coffee every weekday for 50 weeks.
You would spend $1,250 on coffee that year.
Let’s say you buy an espresso maker and a stainless steel mug that lasts you a year. You go for a middle-of-the-road espresso machine because you’re committed to making coffee at home for a year. You spend $300 to make coffee from the comfort of your own home.
You spend $13 on a stainless steel travel coffee mug, which you will hand-wash this year, to take care of it.
So far, you’re annual investment is $313. You have $937 left to spend.
The average latte uses almost 1 cup of milk and about 6 tablespoons of coffee per cup. There are 8 cups of milk in a half gallon of milk from the grocery store, and an estimated 45 tablespoons of coffee in a 12-ounce bag of coffee.
To make a latte every day, 5 days a week, for one month, you will need 3 half-gallons of milk and one bag of coffee per month. And note – you will have leftover milk and coffee every month! That means you may have enough resources to skip a half-gallon of milk one week and buy a syrup instead.
But let’s pretend you’re going to use all your milk and all your coffee.
Currently, a half-gallon of whole milk at my grocery store is $1.72. A 12-ounce bag of medium roast, pre-ground coffee is $7.77. A name-brand, pre-ground coffee is $9.96. Let’s go with the more expensive coffee to truly see if we could save any money.
Your monthly expenses are now $15.12. Over the course of a year, you will spend $181.44 on milk and pre-ground coffee from the grocery store.
Your annual coffee expenses just dropped from $1,250 to $494.44.
How would it feel to invest in the coffee machine of your choice, buy whatever $10 bag of coffee you want, and still have $755.56 in your pocket to spend on whatever coffee equipment you choose?
Learning how to make your coffee at home seems like such a small change to make to put $800 of “extra money” back in your pocket.
And we aren’t even making specialty coffee! In our example, we’re simply going off of run of the mill numbers we found on the internet. Imagine the savings you could reap over the long term if you learned how to make specialty drinks or seasonal drinks.
Has the savings bug pinched you yet? Try my pumpkin spice coffee creamer!
More Money-Saving Gadgets
I’m not a fan of pre-ground coffee. I think that purchasing pre-ground coffee lets the coffee lose some of its flavor.
So I bought a run-of-the-mill coffee grinder for about $10 and whole beans in a bulk bag for about $20. The coffee grinder has kept up with me for almost 10 years! I don’t save too much money on buying whole coffee beans, but I also don’t buy coffee as often. So it all comes out in the wash.
For die-hard coffee drinkers, it’s a great way to gain even more control over the way your coffee tastes. It’s incredible how you can customize the flavor and freshness of your coffee when you grind the coffee fresh.
If you find that you have more personal preferences over how your coffee tastes, I encourage you to look into your own coffee grinder!
If you are still following the scenario of how much it costs to make your coffee at home, you know that you have more than enough money in the budget to buy a coffee grinder!
What other money-saving tips do you use when it comes to coffee? Comment on this blog post and let me know!
Even More Coffee Cost Savings
If you still aren’t sold on kicking the takeout coffee, here are a few more ways you can save your dollars at the drive through.
Some organizations will let you bring your own cup or reusable container for coffee. This depends on the organization, so ask before you bring a container.
Since you are helping them save the cost of a container, they may even give you a credit for bringing in your own container!
Since you’re crunching the numbers, take another look at the menu of your favorite coffee shop. Is there a cheaper alternative to the drink you’re buying?
Let’s use my go-to coffee as an example. Year-round, I like to drink iced lattes. My drink is usually a double shot of espresso with some whole milk poured over an almost full cup of ice. Let’s break that down and see if we can get more coffee for our money.
At some coffee shops, a cup of ice may be free. If that’s the case, I can see what a small, hot latte costs and order a cup of ice on the side. I might get more coffee in my cup to truly stretch my dollar.
If you aren’t a die-hard espresso fan like I am, you can opt for drip coffee. Drip coffee has a much lower concentration than espresso, and it’s not as thick. Drip coffee is also, usually, a cheaper coffee option. So it’s a win win option for sure.
Finally, you can save money on coffee by simply shopping around. Check out your local competitors. Check out local coffee chains over big-name, national chains. You may find that another coffee shop on your morning commute is cheaper than the one you’ve been using.
Make Your Coffee At Home for a Fraction of the Cost
Home-brewed coffee may feel like it costs a small fortune. Don’t let the upfront cost give you sticker shock!
We have walked through the practical ways you can save money or even lower prices on your coffee habit. But I want to hear what you think.
Is turning your kitchen into your own corner coffee shop a good way to save money on coffee? Comment on this blog post and let me know!
And don’t forget to check out these blog posts for more coffee cost-saving tips.
Related Blog Posts
Will Grinding Your Own Coffee at Home Save You Money?
Pumpkin Spice Mason Jar Coffee Creamer
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