UPDATE: Rogers Family Company will send you a Freedom Clip for $1.99 to help you get around the lock-out technology described below. One per household, please. This offer is from a coffer seller, but you are under no obligation to buy any coffee from them.
Other options include refillable K cups from multiple retailers, though they tend to be more expensive (usually $9-$10 each). You can see a variety of options here.
The cost of what you pay for a cup of fancy coffee at home is going up — not down — thanks to a tricky move by the dominant home coffee brewing company.
How your 2.0 Keurig is ripping you off
It recently came to my attention that the Keurig people are making a 2.0 version of their machine with DRM (digital rights management).
I know this sounds crazy, but Keurig is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — a controversial law designed to protect the entertainment industry — to force you to only use proprietary K coffee pods in their new machine!
My executive producer Christa likes to make individual off-brand K cups at home using her Keurig machine. That drives her cost down to around 6 cents a cup.
But as more and more people do what Christa does, Keurig has watched their profits go down. That’s because their business model is based on them making money from all the different coffee manufacturers who pay them royalties to have their coffee in K cups.
So Keurig came out with the 2.0 machine that has a computer chip in it to sense anytime somebody is trying to save money making coffee…and it will not let them make their coffee!
Even if you buy an off-brand refillable coffee pod, if it doesn’t have the Keurig logo on it, it can sense that too.
You’re better served right now with the older 1.0 versions of the Keurig machines to avoid this DRM ploy. They’re available for $50 to $75. Buy one of the older ones if you are price sensitive.
I have never had a cup of coffee in my life and I’m upset for any coffee drinker over this DRM coffee Clarkrage!
