Ran the math on this after one too many founders asked me why I started a coffee delivery company for SF startups.

A 15-person startup where 2-3 people rotate on "coffee duty" once or twice a week: 20 minutes round trip to the nearest good coffee spot, plus the mental tax of remembering whose turn it is. That's roughly 30-40 minutes of engineering/ops time burned weekly on a $15 coffee run. At a blended $60/hr loaded cost, that's $2,000+/year in labor spent on logistics, not code.

Most founders don't count it because it's not a line item — it's just "someone grabs it." But someone is always your best-paid person avoiding a harder task.

What we do instead: weekly delivery of fresh beans + supplies straight to the office, sized to headcount, no subscriptions to manage per-person. Office manager sets it once, team never thinks about it again.

If you're scaling past 10 people and still doing the coffee run shuffle, it's worth automating — same logic as why you don't manually invoice clients anymore.