Make or Buy Calculator
Calculate if it's cheaper to make a recipe at home or buy the ready-made version.
What are you making?
Ingredients only
What you'd buy it for
How often?
From start to finish
Per serving saved
£2.5
Annual Decision
Worth Making
Annual savings
£650
Effective hourly rate
£30/hr
You save £12.5/week by making coffee
Making it
Buying it
Key Insights
260 times per year
You make this 5 times per week
£650 saved annually
That's £54.17/month
£30/hour
Effective rate of return on your time
Is It Actually Cheaper to Make It Yourself?
A flat white from the coffee shop is £3.50. The ingredients (coffee beans and milk) cost about 50p per cup at home. That is a saving of £3.00 per drink. Make one a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, and you save £780. But you also spend 5 minutes making each one, which adds up to 21.7 hours per year, so the effective hourly rate of your DIY effort is £36 per hour. That is a worthwhile use of time. This calculator runs that maths for any item you make at home rather than buy.
It is set up for coffee, lunch, bread, cakes, pasta, smoothies and granola by default, with a custom option for anything else. Punch in your homemade cost per serving, the shop price, the time it takes you to make, and how often you eat or drink it per week. Out comes annual savings, monthly savings, the effective hourly rate of your time, and a verdict on whether the maths is worth the bother.
When the Calculator Says Don't Bother
If your effective hourly rate from making something at home falls below £10 an hour, the tool flags it as a close call. A loaf of supermarket bread costs £1.20; making it at home costs around 80p in ingredients but takes 30 minutes of active time over 4 hours of rising. That works out at roughly 80p saved per loaf, which at one loaf a week is £41.60 a year, but the effective hourly rate is only around £1.60 per hour. You make bread because you enjoy it, not because the maths demands it.
Items where the maths usually wins big: coffee (massive markup at cafes), packed lunches versus shop-bought sandwiches (£3 to £5 saved per meal), smoothies (£4 to £6 saved per drink), and pasta sauce in batch (huge markup on jarred sauce). Items where it usually loses: bread, dried pasta, cheap supermarket biscuits. The calculator does not factor in quality differences (homemade pasta is often noticeably better than shop-bought, even if the maths is even). For tracking the actual ingredient cost per serving on more complex recipes, the [recipe cost calculator](/recipe-cost-calculator) breaks it down line by line.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much can I save by making coffee at home?
If you currently buy a £3 takeaway coffee five times a week and make it at home for around 50p, you save £650 a year. That assumes you actually swap, not 'add the homemade one in addition to the bought one', which is a different and worse trap.
What counts as the cost to make per serving?
Just the ingredients. Cost up the flour, sugar, milk, coffee beans (whatever the recipe uses), divide by the number of servings the recipe makes, and use that figure. Do not include energy costs (negligible per serving), washing up time (it would have happened anyway) or your time (the tool calculates the value of your time separately as the hourly rate output).
Should I include my time as a cost?
The calculator handles this implicitly. It works out the total time you spend per year on making the thing, then divides the annual savings by those hours to give an effective hourly rate. If that rate is above £10/hr the tool says 'worth making'; below £10/hr it flags as a close call. £10/hr is a deliberately low bar (below UK minimum wage) because most homemade options have other benefits (quality, fun, control) that make the maths only part of the picture.
Does this work for batch cooking?
Yes, but use per-serving numbers. If you make 10 portions of pasta sauce in 30 minutes, enter 3 minutes as the time per serving, divide your total ingredient cost by 10 and put that in as the homemade cost. The calculator then assumes the time scales linearly, which is conservative; in practice batch cooking is even more efficient because the prep and clean-up overhead is shared across more portions.
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