It comes with 500 ml and and 1L bottles.You make a bottle as you need it and it all gets drunk straight away. (or at least it does with us)
Taking an amount out of the 2L bottles means the rest starts to get flat quite quickly. Sure, you can buy it in smaller bottles but that just tips the financial balance even more in the favour of the sodastream.
Our current calculated cost is about 20p litre, which seems pretty fair to me.
It costs me $20 to fill a 10 lb CO2 tank. As I said earlier, that $15 you speak of is a rip-off.
I did that for a while. It was kind of a pain. There was a Sports Authority across the street from my complex, before they went belly-up, that I went to at first. Then one day they decided they weren’t going to fill the tanks any more because their CO2 wasn’t “food grade.” 
Then I started going to Dick’s, but I swear that they would be out of CO2 more often than not. And at both places, it was a guaranteed wait of 15 or 20 minutes, waiting for someone to get around to filling the tanks plus the time to fill them.
I finally got sick of it and bought a mod and a 10 lb tank. There’s a home brewery place somewhat nearby that exchanges the tank, so I’m in and out in under two minutes.
We’re talking about the cost of the Sodastream system per the OP, I just want the actual numbers to be included, since no one else gave the specific figures. So yeah, refills are more expensive than a modified system such as you have, but less expensive than buying carbonated water at the store. We’re giving the OP a baseline to compare against, as well as the additional mods you suggest.
I drink too much Coke Zero, it’s my version of a bad coffee/tea habit. It’s not good for me but it is what it is. The one aspect that makes me feel some guilt is the environmental impact of all those cans, getting manufactured, trashed, shipped and stored. The SodaStream sounds like a solution but every review I’ve read is that the cola tastes like crappy bar-gun RC Cola/Diet Rite (or worse).
If Coke offered a home-installable mini-fountain machine (that wasn’t hell to clean) I’d absolutely buy it.
For some folks, cost is the most important thing. For others, not so much.
I have no wish to try and hide a big ol’ CO2 cylinder somewhere in my kitchen with hoses and what not. I figure I spent about $10/month for cheap seltzer in aluminum cans. Yes, I could have gotten it cheaper in plastic bottles, but I hate plastic anything and I hate flat seltzer almost as much.
Now I spend about $15/every 2 months for a new CO2 cylinder that fits into the tidy SodaStream unit on my countertop. That’s what works for me. I don’t mind the extra expense.
On the podcast The Sporkful last week, a food flavorist for Archer Daniels Midland described a recipe for Coke. The recipe contains oranges, limes, lemon, cinnamon,
nutmeg, cloves, and vanilla. If I liked Coke (I don’t), it would be fun to investigate and see what I could come up with as a base to add to carbonated water.
- 1 quart water
- Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
- Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lime
- Finely grated zest and juice of 2 oranges
- 3 large (5-inch) cinnamon sticks, broken into small pieces
- 2 tablespoons dried bitter orange peel
- 2 teaspoons coriander seed
- 1/4 teaspoon finely grated nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon gum arabic (optional)
- 2 pounds sugar
- 1/4 cup browning sauce, such as Kitchen Bouquet
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Ingredients from my homemade syrup link above. Again, it doesn’t taste like Coke, but like an awesome hybrid of Cola and spicy rootbeer. Feel free to skip the gum arabic but the browning sauce is more than just the color, I promise.
Thanks for the synopsis - I may just try it out after all with your recommendation. I’ve been on a lemon juice/zest/grated ginger kick copying some homemade ginger ale from my pre-covid pub-trivia pub.
Ah, thanks =)
I’ve made seltzer for years with a sodastream modded to accept paintball tanks. Way cheaper than the proprietary sodastream tanks, nut not as bulky as the bigger co2 tanks. We have a polar water dispenser, so we are carbonating ice cold delicious water.
I’m loving all the mods, but I’m asking if the Soda Stream system, as is, is cost effective.
It’s been answered several times how much people pay for canister refills. When I was deciding what size canister to go with (now there’s only 1 size), I googled the prices in my region and output per canister (how many liters it can carbonate). You know how much soda you drink, and how much you pay for it. (We don’t know what brands you drink and what it costs you.) And you can find out how much the canister refills go for in your area. Note: places like Bed Bath & Beyond that feature store discount coupons don’t include canister refills in their discounts.
No, not in my opinion, if you’re swapping their proprietary tanks for 14.99 at Staples. Getting a CO2 tank filled is ridiculously cheap. Soda Stream would probably give you a device if you promised to use their CO2 tanks.
My wife was drinking semi-premium bottled seltzer (not Perrier, but a step below) that we bought relatively cheaply at Costco. When we got the SodaStream I calculated that using their 60-liter cylinders at $15 each cost about the same, or maybe a little less, per liter. But we didn’t have to lug the bottled stuff home or deal with recycling the bottles. (We only make seltzer, not flavored drinks.)
If you are buying cheap store-brand club soda now, SodaStream would probably not be cheaper, but would still avoid the transportation and recycling/disposal issues.
I toyed with the ideal of converting to the larger cylinders, but decided that although it might be an interesting DIY project and save a little money, there was no good place in our previous house (and there’s even less room in our current house) to install the rig.
Okay, let’s spell it out then based on the info we have.
Basic entry model, no discounts, no assumptions about coupons or the like, but I’d expect you do better.
If you were just making carbonated water, you just spent (not counting your tap water costs) $86 / 60 = $1.43 per liter of bottled water. For me, the store sells an equivalent quality bottle for @ $1.25. So without refill, definite loss. If you go with a conventional refill, that’s 14.99, so again, divided by 60, you're now running about .25 per bottle, a $1.00 per bottle savings. So by one refill, you’re ahead even using the stock bottles.
If you buy syrup though, the costs change.
This would cost you $37, and make 36Liters, adding $1.03 per liter to our prices above. And, IMHO, the Sodastream syrups aren’t that tasty. So, $1.28 per liter at best and the savings from an improved CO2 option are this point are not making a huge difference (since the syrup is already more than 4 times the CO2 costs). Now many people suggest using less expensive syrup options, like commercial size Snow Cone flavorings, but . . . ehh, I wouldn’t.
So the syrup is what will kill you, no matter the mod. If you make your own syrups as I suggested in earlier posts I generally find that it would roughly equivalent or a bit more than buying syrup, but much higher quality. Your experience will vary.
So TL;DR - if you’re only drinking carbonated water, even with brand name refills, you’ll come out ahead after your first refill. Longer if you get additional bottles or other accessories, but you’ll still eventually come ahead in costs. If you make your own syrups, you’ll get a better product after a bit of practice, but will be spending more than Coke/Pepsi in 2L bottles. If you go full on all in on Sodastream device, no mods, store refills and syrup, you’ll be spending more with a overall lower level of quality from Coke/Pepsi.
BUT in all the cases above, you are reducing the amount of Plastic or Aluminum waste in your community which is a great long term advantage, just one whose cost is beyond my scope of evaluating right here and now.
A less expensive option for the Sodastream syrup is frozen fruit juice concentrate. My kids used to love that.
Whoa. $37 for 4 bottles is very expensive. Target, Best Buy, and Bed Bath & Beyond sell these bottles for $6 each. And BB&B regularly has them on sale for $5.
Well, right now everything is COVID priced due to shortages, hoarding and gouging. 
That’s why I specified
But the OP wanted wanted cost effectiveness, so I have to use the numbers I can get right now. Still, I personally dislike the taste of the Sodastream syrups, probably because they are half sugar / half artificial sweetener. Blech. 
Even so, let’s say we get that 6 per bottle, thats still .67 per L, or $.92 per L with CO2 costs after the first refill. So still Coke/Pepsi retail price. The savings on a custom rig for CO2 can make a bigger difference here, but still, no, you’re not coming out ahead on price.
That’s what I did, too. Then flavored with a squeeze of lime or lemon. Definitely way cheaper than the Sodastream CO2 bottles.
Since we discovered LaCroix water, we’ve stopped using the Sodastream.