How much would you pay per month for an unlimited coffee pass? If you drink coffee daily and don’t brew it at home, that could become a pricey addiction. Yet CUPS, an app out of Israel, recently expanded to this country. Its premise is simple: subscribe and get discounted or even unlimited coffee from independent coffee shops for a discounted price.

Whether this is appealing or not depends on a few things: first, a participating shop needs to be convenient to your home, work, or some point in between. Yet one of the program’s selling points for coffee shop owners is that they can stop participating whenever they feel like it if the program isn’t working for them.

Also, the base price doesn’t include espresso drinks: an unlimited plan for those costs $85 per month. (That’s still a bargain if you have multi-latte workdays.)

In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the company has been a few hundred shops signed up. They find that customers claim they drink about 20% more coffee than they did before, and save about 30% off the sticker price. Are they really saving money if they wouldn’t have bought those extra drinks in the first place? Who knows? Wheeee! Caffeine!

It’s only in New York for now, but could expand to other dense cities later.

CUPS [Official Site]
For $45 Per Month, All the Coffee You Can Drink [Bloomberg Businessweek]

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