Advanced options
The honest version of the famous latte maths: nobody switches every cup, and the flat white with a friend buys more than coffee. But swapping even the routine desk coffees to home or office brewing keeps most of the saving with none of the joylessness.
What The Coffee Cost Calculator Works Out
- Shop habit per year: cups a week x price x 52. Five shop coffees a week at GBP 3.80 is close to GBP 1,000 a year; UK high street prices now run GBP 3.50 to GBP 4.50 for a latte or flat white.
- Same cups at home: the same number of cups at the home cost: instant around 15p, a cafetiere or V60 with supermarket beans and milk around 30p to 40p, pods 50p-plus (the convenience premium plus the aluminium guilt).
- Yearly saving: the difference, with what it would grow to after 10 years saved at 5%. Compounding the gap for a decade produces the five-figure numbers that made "the latte factor" personal finance's most quoted and most resented idea.
- Custom home cost (advanced): enter your own per-cup figure, for example speciality beans at 60p or the office kettle at 10p.
- Cups you would keep buying (advanced): the honest number. The daily coffee often does social and ritual work no thermos replaces, so the realistic saving card only counts the autopilot cups you would actually switch.
- Kit cost and payback (advanced): a cafetiere costs about GBP 15, a decent grinder GBP 40 to GBP 150, and a bean-to-cup machine GBP 400 or more, which amortises to pennies per cup within a year or two for a two-latte household. The card shows how many months of realistic saving pay the kit off, and the net saving in year one.
- Weeks a year (advanced): cut to 46 or 48 if you do not buy coffee on holiday, or to term time or working weeks only.
- Return and years (advanced): override the 5% and 10-year assumptions behind the invested figure, for example 4% in a cash ISA or 7% for a long-run stock market average.
- Per cup and per month (advanced): the saving on each switched cup and the monthly total, which is the amount to move by standing order on payday. A saving that stays in the current account is, by the oldest law of budgeting, not a saving.