Find the cost per cup of coffee pods and capsules.
Pods look cheap because the unit is small, and the effective price per kilogram is what exposes them. A capsule holds around 5.5 g of coffee, so a pod costing thirty-two cents is buying coffee at roughly fifty-eight dollars a kilogram — two to three times the price of good specialty beans and five to eight times supermarket ground. The convenience is real and the dose is consistent, which is genuinely worth something; the point of this calculation is to price that convenience explicitly. Over a year at two pods a day the premium over ground coffee typically runs to seventy or eighty dollars, which is the honest comparison against the cost of a grinder.
Pod cost and premium over ground coffee
Cost per pod = pack price / pods per pack; annual spend = cost per pod x pods per day x 365; premium = (cost per pod - ground cost per cup) x pods per day x 365; effective price per kg = cost per pod x 1000 / 5.5
Because a pod contains only about 5.5 g. The plastic or aluminium shell, the nitrogen flush, the packaging and the licensing all cost more than the coffee, so the price per gram of actual coffee is very high even when the pod is cheap.
Financially, quickly — they bring the cost back down to ground-coffee levels within a few weeks of daily use. They need a burr grinder and a consistent tamp to taste good, which is the real trade-off rather than the money.
That is a personal call, but price it honestly. Around eighty dollars a year for two cups a day buys a decent grinder in the first year and nothing thereafter — worth knowing before deciding the pods are the frugal option.