The whole caption on this one is 'pov: me and the guy that made me a bubble tea addict'. Two friends pose for a photo in our Clayton South warehouse, and that's the whole video.
The habit it jokes about has a price. At $8.40 a cup, one bubble tea a day costs $3,066 a year. The same 365 cups of classic milk tea made at home come to about $333 in ingredients.
How much does a bubble tea habit cost a year?
Between $2,263 and $3,066 if you buy one every day, going by the two cups we paid for on camera in mid-2025: $6.20 for a milk tea at Mixue and $8.40 for a Brown Sugar Milk Tea at Gong Cha. Made at home, the same habit costs $333 a year with a 3kg bag of pearls, or $666 with single-serve quick pearls.
| How often | Shop $8.40 | Shop $6.20 | Home $0.91 | Quick pearls $1.82 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Once a week | $437 | $322 | $47 | $95 |
| Three times a week | $1,310 | $967 | $142 | $285 |
| Every weekday | $2,184 | $1,612 | $237 | $474 |
| Every day | $3,066 | $2,263 | $333 | $666 |
At one cup a day, that's about $2,733 a year less than the $8.40 cup and $1,930 less than the $6.20 one.
Your shop figure will move around. Prices differ between stores, a large or an extra topping goes on every cup, and delivery apps tend to list drinks above the counter price before the delivery fee. Multiply what you normally pay by 365, or by however many cups you actually have, and you've got your own number.
The $0.91 cup, line by line
A 700ml classic milk tea with tapioca pearls costs about $0.91 to make, GST included, when you buy each ingredient as a single pack. The recipe is the one printed on our tea and creamer product pages: 300ml of brewed black tea, 40g of creamer, 20ml of fructose and 30g of dry pearls.
Line by line, from the single-pack prices:
- Signature Black Tea Leaves (C009-TW) cost $19.00 for a 600g bag with no GST. At 6g a cup, that's 100 cups a bag, or $0.19 each.
- Super Coffee Mate Creamer (C804) is $10.50 plus GST for 1kg. 40g a cup gives 25 cups, so $0.46 a cup with GST.
- Fructose (C143) is $18.00 for 5kg with no GST. 20ml a cup stretches to 250 cups, about $0.07 each.
- Tapioca Pearls (C101) are $17.00 plus GST for 3kg. 30g of dry pearls a cup is 100 cups, $0.19 each with GST.
Add them up and you get $0.91 a cup.
The tea works out at 6g a cup because the brewing ratio on the pack is 80g of leaves to 4 litres of water. Fructose is sold by weight and poured by volume, so we've counted 20ml as 20g. Water, ice and power aren't in the total.
Creamer is about half the cost of every cup. If you'd rather use fresh milk, take the creamer line out and put in whatever 300ml of milk costs you at the supermarket.
Over a full year of one cup a day you'd go through 15 bags of creamer, 4 bags of tea, 4 bags of pearls and 2 bags of fructose. That's $360.05 in whole bags, a little more than the $333 above because you'll have some left over at the end of the year. Your first order, one of each, comes to $67.25 and makes 25 cups before the creamer runs out. Delivery is free to metro Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane on orders over $200 before GST, so it pays to buy a few months of dry goods at once.
What doesn't show up in the price per cup?
Mostly time. Pearls take 20 minutes at the boil and another 20 covered off the heat, then a rinse. The tea steeps for 25 minutes at 80°C. Most people who make bubble tea at home cook one batch of pearls and brew one pot of tea for several cups, not one cup at a time.
Cooked pearls are best eaten the day you cook them, because they harden as they sit. Whatever you throw out goes straight onto the cost of the cups you did drink, so cook for the cups you'll actually have that day.
Drinking from a glass adds nothing. If you want proper takeaway cups, the cost per cup breakdown has a 700ml cup, lid and jumbo straw at about $0.31 together at carton prices.
Quick pearls, if you'd rather not cook
Quick Tapioca Pearls 50g (C197) are single serves. You soak them in hot water, microwave for 30 seconds and tip them into the cup. A 10-pack is $10.00 plus GST, or $1.10 a serve, which takes a daily cup from $0.91 to about $1.82.
That's $333 a year more than cooking the 3kg bag. In exchange there's no 40-minute cook and nothing left in the pot. At $666 a year it still costs less than a quarter of a daily $8.40 cup.
Does homemade taste like the shop version?
We tested it on camera. Duff made a brown sugar boba milk to put up against the $8.40 Gong Cha cup and a milk tea to put up against the $6.20 Mixue cup, then handed all three cups to taste testers. Here's what they said. Every pack used here is the same one we sell to tea shops and cafés.
Buying by the carton
Carton prices bring the same 700ml classic milk tea down to about $0.66 a cup in ingredients before GST, according to our cost per cup breakdown. A carton is 30 bags of tea or 6 bags of pearls, though. That suits a big household, a share house or an office. For one person having a cup a day, start with single packs. There's no minimum order.
Drinking something other than classic milk tea? The recipe cost calculator will price your own recipe.
Prices checked 15 October 2026. Sunwide prices are single-pack retail prices on sunwide.com.au, with 10% GST added where it applies. Shop prices are the two cups we bought on camera in mid-2025.
