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Price guide · 2 min readCoffee price per cup: the only number that compares
One figure lets a 1kg bag, a jar of instant and a box of capsules sit in the same list. The maths is one line; the assumptions are the interesting part.
Pack price divided by how many drinks the pack makes. That is price per cup, and it is the unit this whole site runs on. The arithmetic is trivial. The assumptions underneath it are where comparisons quietly go wrong, so every one of ours is written down below.
The calculation
Take the pack price, work out how many drinks the pack makes at a stated dose, and divide. That is the whole method. The dose is the part that has to be declared, because it is the part anyone can quietly move to make a number look better.
| Format | Dose we price on | Cups from a typical pack |
|---|---|---|
| Whole bean | 18g (a double espresso) | 1kg bag ≈ 55 cups |
| Ground | 18g | 227g tin ≈ 12 cups |
| Pods and capsules | One capsule | Box of 10 = 10 cups |
| Instant | 2g (a rounded teaspoon) | 200g jar = 100 cups |
So a £19 kilo of beans is 1000 ÷ 18 = 55.5 cups, which is 34p a cup. A £3.50 sleeve of ten capsules is 35p a cup. Those two numbers are directly comparable. The £19 and the £3.50 never were.
Do it yourself in one line
- Beans or ground: (pack price ÷ pack weight in grams) × 18.
- Pods: pack price ÷ number of capsules.
- Instant: (pack price ÷ jar weight in grams) × 2.
Brew filter rather than espresso and the Specialty Coffee Association benchmark is about 55g of coffee per litre of water. A 300ml mug is therefore roughly a 16.5g dose, near enough to 18g that the comparison still holds.
What the figure deliberately leaves out
Price per cup covers the coffee and nothing else. No milk, no water, no electricity, no machine, no descaler, no filter papers, and none of the capsule machine's own purchase price. That is a deliberate choice: those costs vary so much between households that folding them in would make the number less comparable, not more. Where hardware genuinely changes the answer, and pods are the obvious case, we say so in the guide rather than burying it in the arithmetic.
- Milk can add 10p to 25p to a latte, often more than the coffee itself.
- A pod machine spreads £60 to £150 of hardware over its life; at two cups a day that is 3p to 8p a cup over three years.
- Waste counts. Coffee you buy and do not drink costs infinity per cup.
The cheapest cups we track
Every one of these is priced on the doses in the table above.
Prices are the last we fetched and can move. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. It never changes the order, which is always cheapest per cup first.
Why the cheapest per cup is not always the right buy
Instant will nearly always win on price per cup, and plenty of people have no intention of drinking it. That is fine. The figure is not there to push you down to the cheapest possible cup; it is there so that when you pick a dearer one, you know exactly what the premium costs you. A 12p gap sounds trivial. At two cups a day it is about £88 a year.
Put it to work