Honest Coffee Guide – Coffee Brewing Tools & Content Site

Honest Coffee Guide is a coffee education site built around interactive tools, custom illustrations, and brewing guides. It's not a typical affiliate blog churning out "best coffee maker 2026" listicles. The site features genuinely useful interactive tools — a grind size chart covering dozens of grinders, a brew timer with recipes, coffee-to-water ratio calculators, a burr finder, and moka pot gasket size guides. These are the kind of sticky, bookmarkable tools that bring people back. The content is well-structured, covering grind sizes by brew method, product reviews (particularly strong on moka pots), and an extensive "drinks explained" section with custom diagrams for every drink from flat whites to kaffeost. The whole site is visually distinctive — built on Sanity CMS with Netlify hosting, with original illustrations throughout rather than stock photos.

The site was built by two people: a designer/illustrator with a Central Saint Martins degree and seven years as a barista, plus a partner. They also run a Shopify merch store selling coffee posters (including a "Periodic Table of Coffee Drinks" poster) and an Etsy shop. Monetisation is primarily Mediavine display ads, supplemented by the merch store and what appear to be some affiliate links to coffee equipment. At 122k pageviews generating $1,126/month, the implied RPM is about $9.22 — which is reasonable for Mediavine in a consumer niche but not exceptional.

The core concern is the multiple. At 46.2x monthly profit, this is expensive by any standard. You're paying nearly four years of profit upfront. For context, most content sites trade at 25–35x, and that's for sites with stable or growing traffic and diversified income. The $1,126/month profit on 122k pageviews suggests the site is not maximising its revenue potential — but it also means you're paying a premium for revenue you'd still need to build yourself. There's also a founder dependency question: the custom illustrations and design quality are clearly tied to the creators' skillset. A new owner without design chops would need to either hire for that or accept a different content style going forward.

Growth would likely need to come from:

• Expanding affiliate content for coffee equipment (grinders, espresso machines, kettles) — the site has the authority and traffic but barely monetises product recommendations
• Growing the merch store with new poster/card designs and better integration into the main site
• Building an email list (there's no apparent email capture) for product launches and affiliate promotions
• Expanding into adjacent content: espresso machine reviews, coffee bean/roaster guides, home barista gear comparisons

The $9.22 RPM from display ads alone is fine, but for a site with 122k pageviews in the coffee equipment niche, total monetisation should be significantly higher. Coffee grinders sell for $100–$500+, espresso machines for $300–$2,000+. Even modest affiliate conversion on the existing grind chart traffic — where people are literally looking up settings for specific grinders — could double or triple monthly revenue. The site is sitting on affiliate goldmine traffic and barely tapping it.

What I would offer: $32,000 The 46x multiple is too rich for a display-ad-dependent content site. At $32,000 (~28x), you're paying a fair price for the traffic, tools, and brand while leaving yourself room to grow revenue through affiliate and merch expansion. The custom tooling and design assets have real value, but they don't justify a near-4-year payback.

What the site is worth: $30,000 – $40,000 At the low end, you're paying ~27x for a well-built but under-monetised content site with Google dependency. At the high end, you're pricing in the unique interactive tools, original design work, and clear affiliate upside. This is a good fit for someone with affiliate marketing experience who can plug in equipment recommendations without degrading the site's honest, non-salesy reputation.

This deal is for a buyer who sees the revenue gap between current display-ad income and the affiliate potential of 122k monthly pageviews in a high-ticket equipment niche — and has the skills to close it.