About
I wanted the Big Mac Index, but for the drink I actually buy every day.
An espresso is close to the perfect economic probe: the recipe is identical everywhere — seven grams of coffee, hot water, thirty seconds — so every difference in price is telling you about the economy around the machine, not the thing in the cup. Rent, wages, taxes, tariffs, currency, and what a society thinks a small daily pleasure should cost.
The index covers 196 economies. Some numbers are solid, some are honest estimates — the methodology page tells you which is which, every time. The dataset is versioned in a public git repository, every change is a commit, and the CSV is free to download with no email gate. If you teach with it, write with it, or argue about it over coffee, it's doing its job.
Built in Chicago. Fueled by the obvious.