About $130 per year
I drink about 16 oz of coffee a day. My wife does not drink coffee. For a long time I drank Folgers, but since retirement, I started trying to "up my coffee game."
I notice that I liked Cumberland Farms Farmhouse blend. I bought a bag, and that was a step improvement from Folgers. I did some reading, and Consumer Reports recommended some coffee makers, and I decided to buy a Bonavita BV1901TS drip coffee maker. IIRC, it was about $120 and the thing that made it attractive was that CR said that it made small batches well. It meets the coffee standards institute for temperature and time, so it's a good machine.
Serendipity, the throat is tall enough to allow me to brew directly into my 16 oz insulated coffee mug. I drink it over the course of 2-3 hours and it stays warm.
I was happily brewing my CF Farmhouse blend for months and I happened to have some coffee at an inexpensive restaurant that I liked better than my own. When I thought about it, I realized that the first pot of the CF coffee was great, but subsequent pots were less great. So I decided to grind my own.
Again CR comes to the rescue with a $16 coffee grinder that their experts could not detect the difference vs. expensive burr grinders. I tried a number of whole bean coffees, not including CF - they don't sell in whole bean. After reading more reviews and tastings, I settled on 8 O'Clock 100% Columbian peaks. I experiment with other brands, but I keep coming back to that one. It costs $13.24 for 40 oz. Since I use 1 oz per 16 oz water, that works out to 40 days supply. $.33/day. 40 days supply is too much, quality deteriorates at the end, but I am too cheap to buy smaller quantities at a much higher price. At this time I started using the proper amount of coffee per cup. I was using only about 60% of what I should have been using.
I didn't mention it, but the Bonavita has a "pre-infusion" setting that wets the coffee and lets it outgas for a minute or so. That setting does indeed improve the coffee. I put artificial sweetener in my coffee, but no milk or cream. That gets the cost per year up to about $130.
It doesn't take long in the morning to blitz 2.5 scoops of beans and put them in the filter basket. It brews in 5 min or so, so not a big convenience penalty over K-cups. I really look forward to that coffee each morning.
Along the way in this coffee experimentation, I tried brewing with different water. I have great tasting well water with a ph of 5.9. My son has decent tasting water with a ph of 8.0. The coffee with my water was significantly better. Water matters.
The point of all this is that you can drink a lot better coffee for not a lot more money.