About PayoffTime

The problem we're solving

Most people know that buying a coffee maker is "cheaper than Starbucks in the long run." But how long is the long run? Is it three months? Two years? Never, if you only use it twice a week?

Product reviews tell you whether something is good. PayoffTime tells you when it pays off. There's a real number hiding in every purchase decision — we just do the arithmetic and show our work.

How it works

Every article follows the same formula: take the upfront cost, divide it by the monthly savings over the alternative, and you get the breakeven point in months. That's it. No black boxes, no "it depends" without an explanation.

We state every assumption up front — usage frequency, alternative cost, ongoing expenses — and we include a sensitivity table showing how the math changes if your situation differs from the baseline. If the numbers only work for heavy users, we say so.

What we don't do

We don't review products. We don't score build quality, compare features, or tell you which espresso machine tastes better. Other sites do that well. We do one thing: the payoff math.

We also don't pretend to account for everything. Time saved, environmental impact, the pleasure of a quiet Saturday morning with a home-brewed cup — these matter, they're just hard to put a number on. We put them in the "Fine Print" section of each article and let you weigh them yourself.

The numbers are real

Product prices shown on this site are approximate reference prices — the math in each article uses the price we verified at time of writing. Prices change; click through to Amazon to see the current price before making a decision. The underlying math — the formula, the assumptions, the breakeven calculation — is what we stand behind.

Alternative costs (restaurant meals, barbershop visits, bottled water) are sourced from Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer expenditure data and current national retail averages. We link our sources or state our reasoning in every article.

Affiliate disclosure

PayoffTime is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. When you click a product link and make a purchase, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This is how the site stays free.

Our affiliate relationships don't influence our math. If a product doesn't pay off under realistic assumptions, we say so in the article — that's the whole point of the site. A six-year breakeven is a six-year breakeven, regardless of the commission rate.

Who we are

PayoffTime is an independent site built by someone who got tired of doing breakeven calculations in spreadsheets every time they considered a purchase. If the math is going to get done anyway, it might as well be public and searchable.

Questions, corrections, or suggestions for articles? The methodology is documented at How it works.