Daily Meal’s Five Nespresso Downsides, From Pod Costs to Lock-In

Daily Meal has a list of five downsides to owning a Nespresso, written by a Vertuo Pop owner who says they’re still happy with the machine. The complaints are familiar, but the pod math is worth a look.

The biggest one is cost. Daily Meal puts pods at around $1 for Original and $1.50 for Vertuo, and points out that Nespresso sells them in sleeves of 10, so two cups a day works out to about $40 to $60 a month. That beats a daily café latte, the writer notes, but it’s well above home-brewed ground coffee, which the outlet figures at about 50 cents a cup.

Next is lock-in. Original machines have third-party and refillable options, but Vertuo reads a barcode on each capsule, and Daily Meal says Nespresso’s patents keep outside Vertuo pods rare. The other three are the amount of plastic in the machine, which the writer raises as a microplastics concern, the near-total lack of brew settings, and the old argument that Nespresso isn’t true espresso. The one Vertuo tweak it mentions is double-pressing the button for a smaller, more concentrated cup.

Two details in the piece look off. It says Vertuo debuted in 2023, but the system has been sold in North America since 2014. And its brew temperatures of 83 to 86 degrees and 78 degrees are labeled Fahrenheit, which can’t be right for hot coffee; those read like Celsius figures.

Our take: the pod-cost and lock-in points are the ones that matter before you buy. If cheaper capsules are a priority, an Original machine and our Nespresso-compatible pods guide will save more than any Vertuo trick. Still deciding? Our Vertuo buying guide lays out the models.