Direct-trade premiums, freight, roaster wages, and retail margin — the full breakdown of where your money goes.
We get asked why a bag costs what it does, and we'd rather answer it openly than hide behind 'specialty.' So here's roughly where the money in a $22 bag goes. The exact figures move with the harvest and freight market, but the shape is consistent — and it's very different from the supermarket shelf.
Green coffee and the direct-trade premium
The single biggest line is the green coffee itself. We buy direct from farms and pay well above the commodity 'C-market' price — often two to three times it for the microlots. That premium is the whole point: it's what lets a producer invest in the drying beds, the water, and the careful processing that make the coffees we want to sell. Cheap coffee is cheap because someone upstream wasn't paid enough to do the work properly.
Freight, customs, and shrinkage
Green coffee crosses an ocean. There's freight, import duty, customs brokerage, and the simple fact that coffee loses weight when you roast it — beans shed 15–18% of their mass as water during roasting, so a kilo of green is not a kilo of roasted. All of that lands before we've sold a single bag.
Roasting, labour, and packaging
- Roaster wages — we pay a living wage and the craft takes skilled time, especially roasting weekly in small batches rather than huge production runs.
- Energy and equipment — the roaster, the grinders, the QC cupping that rejects off batches.
- Compostable packaging — it costs more than plastic-lined bags, and we think it's worth it.
- Carbon-neutral shipping — we offset the last-mile freight to your door.
“If a bag of specialty coffee seems expensive, compare it to a single cafe latte. A $22 bag brews roughly twenty cups. The maths is firmly on coffee-at-home's side.”
Founder's letter
Why subscription is cheaper for everyone
Subscriptions let us forecast how much green to buy and how much to roast each week, which cuts waste dramatically — and waste is just cost we'd otherwise have to price in. That's why subscribers pay less per bag than one-off buyers: it genuinely costs us less to serve you. You can skip, swap, or pause any week, so there's no downside to locking it in. That's the honest pitch.
