Tool · Coffee
Type in what you pay for a bag of coffee and what you pay at the counter, and the calculator prices a cup made at home against a cup bought out — per cup, per year, and over five years.
Where does each number come from?
- What the bag costs, and how much it weighs
- The price on the shelf tag and the weight printed on the bag. Both boxes start at the government’s average grocery-store price for a pound of ground coffee, which is listed further down under what the calculator takes as given. A twelve-ounce bag from a roaster is a different price for a different weight, so if that’s what you buy, change both boxes together.
- Cups per day
- How many you’d make at home. The yearly figure counts every day of the year, weekends included.
- What the café charges
- Per cup, for the drink you order — it’s on your receipt, or on the menu board. The box starts at the middle price of a plain hot coffee across a lot of restaurants; a latte costs more than that, so type what you pay.
- Grams of coffee per cup
- For most people this is a guess, and it moves the answer more than the bag price does. The box starts at a coffee industry standard worked out for a twelve-ounce mug. If you weigh your coffee, you already know your number; if you scoop it, the brew ratio calculator gives you a figure for your method to start from.
- Brewer and grinder, and how long they'll last
- What you paid for the gear, spread over the years you expect to use it. Left at zero, the answer is beans alone.
What moves the answer?
Let’s say a pound of coffee costs $9 and you use 20 grams a cup. That pound makes about 23 cups, so the coffee in each one costs around 40 cents. Use 15 grams instead and the same bag makes 30 cups at about 30 cents each. Buy a $15 twelve-ounce bag from a roaster and the cup goes to about 90 cents. Against a $4 coffee bought out, every one of those is a gap of three dollars or more per cup, which is why how much coffee you use and which bag you buy decide the home figure, while the café price mostly decides how wide the gap is.
Over a year, one cup a day at 40 cents comes to about $145. The same cup bought out at $4 a day is about $1,460, so the difference is around $1,300 a year for one cup a day. Two cups a day doubles it, and a coffee you only buy out twice a week comes to about $400 a year.
What does the calculator take as given?
- The bag price
- Starts at $9.30 a pound, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average for ground coffee at grocery stores across the country in August 2026, published with the August inflation figures on 11 September. It’s supermarket coffee, and it’s an average, so your store’s tag will differ.
- The café price
- Starts at $3.77, the middle price of a regular hot coffee in July 2026 across the restaurants that run their registers on Toast’s system, published 11 August. Toast is a company that sells the register, so this is a business’s data rather than a government figure — and it’s the only monthly café price anyone publishes in the open.
- The dose
- Starts at about 20 grams, which is the Specialty Coffee Association’s standard of 55 grams of coffee for every liter of water, worked out for a twelve-ounce mug.
- Prices stay flat
- The five-year table uses today’s prices for every year, and the line under the table says so each time it runs. Coffee prices have moved a lot lately; the calculator doesn’t guess where they go next.
- What's left out
- Milk, sugar and syrups. Filters, water and electricity. Your time. And the size of the cup — a café’s large and your mug at home are priced exactly as you type them, with nothing adjusted for how much is in each.
The one cup a day and the twenty-gram scoop are starting points to get the math moving; the bag you buy, the drink you order and how much coffee you put in the filter set your own number, and two of those three are on a receipt.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Price Data, series APU0000717311, Coffee, 100%, ground roast, all sizes, per lb., U.S. city average — $9.299 for August 2026, published with the August CPI on 11 September 2026.
- Toast, Inc., Menu Price Monitor, July 2026 Median Regular Hot Coffee Prices Rise to $3.77, published 11 August 2026.
- Specialty Coffee Association, SCA Standard 310-2021 — 55 g per liter, the ratio behind the default dose; carried with its quote in Brew Ratios by Method: The Reference Table.