Frugal

Here's a joke that might give some insight:

So there I was waiting at the traffic lights in my VW, smoking a cigarette. A non-smoker pulled up in a Toyota and asked me how many I smoked, and I said 20 a day. He asked me when I'd started and I said 20 years ago. He told me that if I'd never smoked, I'd have saved enough money to buy a Ferrari. I asked him where his Ferrari was.

If you don't care about the taste of your coffee, just buy caffeine pills on Amazon. $8 and you get 200 pills of 200mg each, about as much as a strong coffee.

If you enjoy coffee, it's not the item to save money on. €280 per year is not anything to get excited about. 280 a month or per quarter, maybe

Secondly, it’s actually not bad. It does have that faint “cheap coffee” taste, but after a few cups I barely notice it anymore.

College students frequently buy decent beer for the first drink, then loads of cheap horrible beer for consumption afterwards during that same sitting.

If you're drinking multiple cups of coffee, maybe buy both the good and the bad simply limit your consumption of the good stuff to one cup a day giving yourself a pass to drink as much of the cheap stuff afterward as you want.

How are you buying/making your coffee? I switched from good quality instant to good quality beans and halved the price per month and got much better coffee in the process.

I did need a grinder and an espresso machine which consumed the first years savings, but after that it was all crema and savings.

What are you saving for? Set some financial goal such that once you reach it you'll switch back.

...is the tradeoff worth it?

This question is impossible to answer, I believe, considering the utterly subjective origin of the question.
I am sorry, but it feels more like you are trying to outsource the responsibility for a decision only you should make. If so, that may not end well, since in the end, everyone has their own priorities in their own environments and requirements.

I think 280€ is a huge saving. I think of saving holistically, rather than each individual item. If you make similar savings on three other annual expenses, that's 1120€ more in your savings account earning 50€ p.a.

If your 1.28€ coffee is costing you 50€ a year, coffee is now FREE for the rest of your life! When we were saving to quit our jobs, this is how we motivated ourselves; with a list of expenses and we got to cross them off one by one as they were covered.

Not only are you saving more money now, you'll actually need less money to maintain your lifestyle. Every $1 saved in a recurring expense is more like $2 saved in that way.

Don't always go for the cheapest item though - shop around! The homebrand Lidl coffee is my choice in Europe, but it's not as good as the homebrand Aldi coffee in Australia... but the Woolworths one tastes like bong water. If I lived in one place rather than travelling though, I'd get a moka pot and use beans rather than instant.

I'm all for being frugal, but not when it comes to matters of taste, usually.

My wife and I like to do blind taste tests.

Like, yeah, the offbrand worschester sauce is a couple bucks cheaper, but in a side by side comparison, the name brand has way more flavor.

In a twist, our local offbrand instant pudding is noticeably better than jello brand.

We don't buy offbrand broth anymore, it tastes like water when compared side by side with name brand.

I could go on and on, but you get the point.

When it's reasonable, we get the better tasting thing, but it has to be a blind test. No bias. That doesn't mean I'm gonna get the ultra fancy broth that costs 3 times as much though. It has to be comparable.

So in our case, coffee is something we both enjoy, and we don't drink THAT much, so we splurge on boutique beans from a local roaster. Costs a few dollars more per pound than the regular beans. Probably significantly more than something like Folgers, but I haven't priced that in a long time.

Edit: That being said, I do know what community I'm in. We meal prep and do leftovers all week. Diy overnight oats because it's cheap and healthy. Other simple quick meals involving possessed precooked frozen items because it's cheap enough and super easy, for certain times. Etc etc. It's just... Sometimes you want tasty things, and it matters. Being frugal is important to us, but so it's enjoying life.

So it's a choice you have to make I guess.

Bad coffee is never worth it.

now do the math on poopin at work. its enlightening

Why not both? Sure you won't save as much, but sometimes it's nice to have good coffee as a treat.

Or try mixing in ~10% of the good stuff with the cheap to see if it helps mask the cheap taste

Do you guys have Aldis in your country?

Spend on what you value, not on what you can afford. Only you can decide what you value.

If you want to test, drink the cheaper coffee until you've decided you value the other enough to drink it.

So many folks try to reason this kind of decision out, when trying both options is easy enough.

At that point, why not just switch to caffeine pills? It will be cheaper and skips all the costs of heating the water.

If you want to save money with your drug habit, that's a more sensible way to do it than paying more than that for terrible coffee.

I have a friend who got hooked on those instant coffee packets, you just stir it into water. He prefers the way it tastes now to regular coffee. That also might be cheaper than your current option?

I don't consume caffeine on a daily basis (maybe once a week, at most), so I can't comment on this, really. Coffee is only something I do occasionally for pleasure, and I usually roast my own beans and make the best coffee I can at home when I'm having coffee. I haven't run the numbers on how cheap green beans are relative to buying pre-roasted coffee. I'm so spoiled that even if green beans were more expensive, I would still prefer to roast and have fresh coffee.

You might also be able to hit up a local food pantry, dumpster diving or Buy Nothing group and get tea or coffee for free - that is cheaper than all these other options (at least in terms of money, no guarantees on time).

Even cheaper to kick the caffeine addiction entirely and just drink water.

It will suck for a few weeks to a month as you go through withdrawal, but after that, you won't miss it. And in the long run, you'll end up feeling better for longer.

…it's getting rarer and rarer to find ways to pocket savings of this level anymore.

Point of diminishing returns. If your enjoyment of the coffee ritual takes a larger hit than the dollars you’re saving, it’s not worth it.

What's the two euro stuff like?