Bean-to-cup or capsules: the real cost per cup over 3 years

A cost table is only as good as the numbers you feed it. Here are ours, stated openly so you can redo the sum with your own prices.

The coffee price comes from Grain d'Expert, whose April 2026 survey puts a kilo of beans in France at €25 to €31, which works out at €0.17 to €0.21 for a 7 g dose against €0.25 to €0.55 per capsule depending on the system. We took €0.18 and €0.35, give or take the middle of both ranges.

The cross-check comes from Coffee-Spirit (MaxiCoffee), which costed a year at 3 cups a day in February 2025: around €186 for beans, €324 to €486 for Nespresso Original, close to €560 for Vertuo. Our two figures land inside that.

Two caveats, honestly the two things readers argue about every single time. A 7 g dose is already generous next to what a lot of articles assume. NeozOne went with 5 g and its own commenters pointed out that a real bean-to-cup machine pulls closer to 7 to 9 g, and a dose that low quietly inflates the bean saving. The other caveat is the machine price. At €700 for the grinder machine, the break-even moves a long way to the right.

Estimated total, machine plus coffee plus maintenance, divided by the number of cups. This is our own arithmetic from the line items above, not a quoted figure.

Two cups a day. That's the crossover.

Below it, the bean machine and its upkeep never pay back inside three years, simply because there aren't enough cups to work off the €208 gap at purchase. Above it, every cup hands €0.17 back to the beans and the gap runs away. At six cups a day NeozOne finds payback in under a year, which fits our slope.

None of the comparisons we looked at includes maintenance. It's the line that moves the crossover.

A bean-to-cup machine wants descaler, water filters and cleaning tablets. Adding up ordinary retail prices lands somewhere around €150 to €300 a year if you also pay for a service visit, and closer to €10 to €40 a year if you do everything yourself. That's a range reconstructed from retailer pricing, not a figure published by a lab or a manufacturer, so treat it as an order of magnitude and not much more.

We settled on €70/year, a middle value that assumes descaler and filters bought regularly with no service contract.

How often depends on your water. Above 15 °dH it's monthly. On soft water, every three or four months does the job.

And no, capsule machines are not maintenance-free. They need descaling too, less often and more cheaply, which is where the €15/year in the table comes from.

This part needs saying plainly, because most sites writing about it sell beans. At one cup a day the capsule is the rational choice. Over three years it costs €187 less, it takes less counter space, it wakes nobody at 7 in the morning and it needs no dialling in at all.

UFC-Que Choisir reported in February 2025 that capsules and pods now account for more than a third of coffee volumes sold in French supermarkets, despite costing clearly more than beans or ground coffee. That isn't a collective mistake. It's a trade the buyer makes on purpose, price against simplicity.

For a one-person household, occasional use, or a backup machine for guests, the Krups Inissia at €78 covers it with no argument.

Nespresso Krups Inissia Blanc - Machine à café Compacte & Kit de bienvenue

Two routes exist, and our built-in vs separate grinder comparison breaks down the trade-offs of each. Here's a quick bean to cup machine comparison between the two routes before you pick a product.

The easy route, a built-in grinder

Press the button, the machine grinds, you get a cup. The De'Longhi Magnifica S is the most visible entry-level model in this category in France at €286 on Amazon.fr as of 28/08/2026, and it's the machine price used throughout this article. Its Amazon.fr rating sits at 4.1 across 7,623 reviews on the same date. At that price and with that rating, it stays one of the best value-for-money bean-to-cup machines with a built-in grinder sold in France.

De'Longhi Magnifica S ECAM11.112.B - Perfetto Machine à Café Automatique avec Mousseur à Lait Manuel

The cheaper route, portafilter plus a separate grinder

A portafilter espresso machine costs less than a bean-to-cup and leaves the dose and the tamp in your hands. The De'Longhi Dedica Style EC685 is €140 as of 28/08/2026.

One word about the number on the box, since it's the number everyone reads first. A consumer espresso machine is usually advertised at 15 or 19 bar of pump pressure. Espresso extracts at roughly 9 bar at the puck (see our explainer on espresso's ideal pressure if the number on the box has you curious). That pump peak is a sales figure, not the working pressure, and it does not make the coffee better. Grind and dose decide the cup.

De'Longhi Dedica Style EC685.BK

The grinder, half the budget people forget

For whole beans, a portafilter without a burr grinder is pointless, because supermarket pre-ground is too coarse and too stale for espresso. The De'Longhi KG79 at €49 as of 28/08/2026 is the usual entry point, listed by the manufacturer with 16 grind settings. So the pair costs €189 against €286 for the built-in grinder machine: cheaper, but more handling every morning. To compare other models, see our pick of the best electric burr coffee grinders.

De'Longhi KG79 - Moulin à Café Électrique à Meules, 16 Niveaux de Mouture

The sum only talks about money. It ignores taste, the 1,460 capsules a year that four daily cups amount to, the counter space a grinder machine eats, and the fact that a bean machine has to be cleaned.

Bean-to-cup or capsules, the honest answer sits in your own numbers, not ours. Run the table again with your own figures: your price per kilo, your real consumption, the machine you actually have in mind. Under two cups a day, keep the capsules and spend the difference on better coffee. Above it, beans are already ahead well before year three ends. If you're going the bean route, our guide to the best bean-to-cup coffee machines helps you pick the right model for your budget.