Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love my Sodastream machine the convenience and variety of flavors are worth the purchase price... but you cannot save money using these machines unless you make your own syrups and/or use alternative ways to supply CO2. First the CO2. The Sodastream 130-Liter Carbonator that is supposed to do 130 liters will actually only do around 75, exchanges/refill is $30 each giving you about $0.43 in CO2 cost for each liter made. Using the cheapest Sodastream syrup you are looking at an additional $0.42 a liter and $1.67 per liter for the cane sugar syrup. This gives you a $0.85 cost per liter ($1.70 per 2 liter) using the cheapest Sodastream syrup and $2.09 per liter ($4.18 per 2 liter) for their cane sugar syrup. These per liter prices are much higher than what you can find soda on sale for in 2 liter bottles. You cannot save money doing this. The good news is by making your own syrups using snow cone concentrate bought bulk online or unsweetened kool-aid, pure Sucralose powder and critic acid bought from Amazon you can get the syrup cost down to as low as $0.20 per liter. Detailed instruction for doing this can be found online. As for CO2 you options are adapters/hoses (at a fairly hefty upfront cost) so you can use soda machine CO2 tanks or a Paintball tank adapter (at a lesser but still significant upfront cost). Doing this you can get the CO2 cost down to well below $0.10 a liter. If you drink a lot of soda you will recoup the up front cost in 2-5 months and then the savings are huge. Some folks have concerns about using paintball tanks as the CO2 is not "food grade" I do not have concerns because I worked in the paintball industry 12 years and the gas suppliers we used filled our tanks from exactly the same source as "food grade", I suspect this is true pretty much everywhere but then that is a choice you have to make. Home brewers have been using non "food grade" for decades with no issues. If you make your own syrup and find alternative CO2 you can save a good deal of money but only if you do those things. Either way I enjoy my Sodasteam.