Is a coffee machine worth it when there is a good café 200 metres from my door? Espresso

The cost that never appears in these threads is beans and time. Good beans at home are maybe £20 a kilo, which at 18 grams a shot is roughly 36p a drink, plus milk, plus about four minutes a morning including cleaning. Still enormously cheaper than £3.20, but the four minutes is the thing that actually decides whether people keep it up.

The variable you can control is quality of your own output, and at £600 all in that is genuinely achievable — but only if you accept that the first two months will be worse than the café and you will have to care enough to fix it. If you already know you will not enjoy that period, the honest answer is keep walking to the café.

Made this swap four years ago with a café on my corner. What happened is the split: I make the first one at home because I am not dressed, and I still buy the second one because the walk is the point of the walk. So my spend halved rather than went to zero, and the machine paid for itself in about a year at your numbers. Nobody tells you the honest answer is a partial substitution.

Politely disagreeing with the whole premise. If the café is good and 200 metres away, you are not buying coffee, you are buying twenty minutes out of your flat, and a machine does not replace that. I bought one under the same reasoning, used it for five months, and sold it at a loss. The people for whom home espresso works are usually the ones without a good café nearby.

Terse: buy the grinder first, keep buying café coffee, and start with filter at home for a month. If you are still enjoying the ritual after four weeks, buy the machine. If the grinder is already annoying you, you have your answer for £150 instead of £600.

Small correction to the £1,500 framing: your alternative is not zero, it is the machine, plus beans, plus milk, plus descaler, plus the eventual repair. At two drinks a day I ran it at about £280 a year in consumables, so the saving is real but it is more like £1,200 than £1,500, and the payback is under a year either way.