Ask five office coffee companies in the GTA what they charge and you will get five quote forms. That is not an accident. Below are the numbers we would use ourselves to sanity-check a breakroom budget in 2026, broken out by setup type, followed by a worked estimate for a 30-person office.
One assumption runs through all of it: roughly 1.5 to 2 cups per coffee-drinking employee per workday, and about 70–80% of a typical office drinking coffee at all. Adjust upward for shift work, dealerships, clinics and anywhere clients also drink.
Setup 1: Drip brewer and ground coffee
Cheapest sticker price, most hidden cost. Budget roughly $8–$15 per employee per month for coffee, filters, whitener, sugar, cups and stir sticks. What that number leaves out is labour: somebody places the order, somebody brews the pot, somebody discovers the pot went dry at 2 p.m. If an office manager billing out at $30/hour spends two hours a week on the breakroom, that is roughly $260 a month that never appears on a coffee invoice.
Setup 2: Single-serve pods
Pods at office-supply pricing typically run $0.70–$1.10 each. Take 30 people, assume 24 regular drinkers at 1.6 cups a day, and you land near 1,050 cups a month — roughly $735–$1,150 monthly, or about $25–$38 per employee. That is before the machine, before descaling, and before the recycling conversation nobody wants to have.
Setup 3: Bean-to-cup
Here you buy coffee instead of packaging, so ingredient cost per cup drops sharply. The variable is the machine. Three ways to get one:
- Buy outright — commercial bean-to-cup equipment is a capital purchase, and service contracts are usually separate and extra.
- Lease — a fixed monthly payment on a 36 to 60 month term, whether the office is full that month or empty.
- Pay-per-cup — the model we run. $0 equipment cost, and you pay for the cups your team actually pours.
Setup 4: Full-service managed programs
National vendors bundle machine rental, product and service into one monthly figure. Read the minimum-spend line before the price line. A program quoted attractively per cup can still bill you a flat floor in a slow month, in August, or over the holidays.
Why almost nobody publishes a price
Two reasons, and only one is defensible. The defensible one: cup volume genuinely varies, so a single sticker price would be wrong for most offices. The other one: an opaque quote lets a rep price to what your company looks like it can pay, and lets equipment rental and minimum spend hide inside a blended number. The fix is not a longer quote — it is knowing the per-cup rate and the equipment charge as two separate figures.
A worked estimate: 30-person office
Assume 24 coffee drinkers, 1.6 cups per person per workday, 21 working days — about 800 cups a month, plus a few dozen more for visitors and meetings. On a per-cup model your monthly cost is that volume times your rate, and nothing else: no lease payment, no service contract, no delivery fee, no cleaning line item. Weekly cleaning, restocking and repair are included, so the labour cost that quietly inflated the drip-brewer scenario goes to zero.
Machine sizing for that office points at the 350 Touch, which suits 20 to 50 people and holds roughly 114 cups per refill. Under 25 people, the 125 Touch is the right fit; past 40, or with public traffic, the 550 Touch adds card, coin and token payment so the amenity can pay for itself.
Four questions to ask any provider
- What is the per-cup rate, stated separately from equipment?
- Is there a monthly minimum, and what happens in a slow month?
- What is the term, and what does cancelling cost?
- Who cleans the machine, how often, and is it billed?
Our answers, in order: per-cup only; no minimum; no contract, cancel anytime; we clean it weekly and it is included. See the full service breakdown, or skip the estimating and run the numbers on your own volume with a free one-week trial — machine installed, no obligation, and we take it back at no charge if the math does not work for you.