If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so much higher than anything you can get from a pod that's been sitting around with pre ground coffee, and it only takes a couple minutes while you're waiting for Claude to rewrite your codebase in Rust or whatever it is "Hackers" do these days

I want a cup of coffee not a science project.

If a gram scale and a grinder that has one knob and one button is too much to deal with then I guess you do need K-cups after all.

300g of water over 17g of freshly ground beans will pretty much always beat the K-cup on quality, is cheaper and produces less waste. You don't even need fancy beans, my go-to is the store brand bean from the supermarket.

There's some really good hand grinders these days too, minimal effort and only takes a minute.

It can wear on you a bit if you make lots of coffee but I went years with a Hario skerton hand grinder until my partner got sick of it and got us a reasonably priced election burr

Truly you could be making great coffee at home with <$75 of equipment. Gram scale, eBay secondhand conical hand grinder, department store kettle, pourover funnel, filters.

I wonder if the gourmet high end plastic ends up in the brew.

It pairs wonderfully with all the plastic in your water.

As opposed to the plastic pipes your water runs through, the plastic water filter, plastic coffee maker, and plastic travel mug you pour it into?

I usually don’t run high pressure boiling water through my plastic pipes.

Not a 1-1 comparison. For my daily double shot espresso, actual gourmet locally roasted coffee costs me just over $2. My coffee equipment cost enough that factoring in some kind of depreciation for it seems necessary, which would put my costs somewhere in the ballpark of $3 all in with a 5 year full depreciation. Paying someone else $4 for a them to make a coffee doesn't actually sounds that crazy if it's good coffee.

lol gourmet (coffee) and keurig pods don’t go together in the same sentence.

If you want to save money get a Moka pot instead of that Keurig garbage.

Even cheaper, tastes better, and takes only slightly longer to make.

You can solve this problem even better by drinking instant coffee. Bonus points for it making yuppies cringe.