Coffee Machine Cost: The one thing more important
The most common question we get at Aquaspresso is what is the cost of renting or purchasing an office coffee machine or coffee vending machine. While this is fairly straightforward answer, we always like to highlight what we feel is the one thing which is probably even more important than cost and that is flexibility.
When purchasing or renting a coffee machine there are three aspects to consider other than price.
What are you paying for?
Coffee machines for the home range in price from around R900 to R30000. So, is the R30000 coffee machine much better than the R900 one? Well it’s definitely more feature rich, but does it suit your needs better? Is an LCD screen an absolute requirement? For some people, this feature is a must, but for other people two coffee bean hoppers is a must. List all the features of the coffee machine and then weigh that up in conjunction with comparing price.
What System are you getting?
There are really four types of systems when it comes to coffee machines. Filter coffee, capsule coffee, coffee beans and instant coffee. Each machine uses a different coffee product which affects the price of the coffee machine but more importantly affects the price which you pay on a monthly basis once you have bought or rented the coffee machine. A capsule coffee machine will cost a lot less than an automatic bean-to-cup coffee machine but once you have the automatic machine, coffee beans will cost you about one-third of what capsules will cost you, as most coffee companies make their money off coffee capsules, not coffee beans.
What does the coffee taste like?
This is probably the most important of all things to consider, and often the most overlooked. Especially when renting a coffee machine, you want to make sure that the coffee you get from your supplier (typically also where you got the coffee machine) is one you actually like. If the price of your coffee machine is right, and the functionality of your coffee machine is right, you still need to make sure that the taste of the coffee is right.
Now because all these three aspects are relatively unknown at the point of purchase or rental of a coffee machine, we believe it is crucial to ensure that you have total flexibility.
Total flexibility means that as many of your options remain open for as long as possible:
- You want to be able to give your machine back altogether if you aren’t happy with your supplier – therefore insist on a one month trial.
- You want to be able to change coffee machines or coffee systems at any time – If your company has 3 people today and a capsule coffee machine is the right machine for you and then in 2 years time your company has 30 people, you need to have the option to change coffee machines and coffee systems altogether to better suit your circumstances at that time.
- You want to be able to start renting and later on, if renting no longer works for you, then you may want the option to buy the machine at any stage during your rental.
- You want to ensure that the term of your rental (if you are renting) is sufficiently short. We would always recommend never signing a rental term over 1 year. Maybe sometimes a 2 year rental term is acceptable but we strongly suggest never getting locked into anything longer than that.
The price of the coffee machine is of course hugely important and is the right place to start initially, but always try to ensure that the cost of your coffee machine doesn’t come at the price of zero flexibility.
Click here for the pricing of our coffee machines
