I started making my own oat milk about two months ago and the math genuinely surprised me

I want to preface this by saying i was skeptical. I had seen people talk about homemade oat milk online and my immediate reaction was always "sure but is it actually worth the effort" because i think a lot of frugal wins look good on paper and then fall apart when you account for the time involved.

So i actually tested it properly before deciding anything. Store bought oat milk where i live runs about 3.50 for a litre of the decent stuff, not the cheapest, not the fancy barista version, just the regular one i was going through maybe two litres a week. I looked up a basic recipe. One cup of rolled oats, four cups of water, blend for about thirty seconds, strain through a cheesecloth or a thin tea towel, done. A 500g bag of rolled oats costs me about 1.20 and makes roughly eight batches of a litre each.

So i'm paying about 15 cents per litre versus 3.50. Even if i'm being generous with my time estimate and saying the whole process takes me six minutes including cleanup, which it doesn't, it's closer to four, that is a very easy trade for me. The taste took maybe three days to adjust to, it's a little thinner than commercial oat milk and slightly less sweet but i genuinely don't notice anymore. The one thing i'll flag is that homemade oat milk doesn't froth the same way for coffee, so if that matters to you it's worth knowing. For everything else, porridge, smoothies, cereal, baking, it works perfectly. I'm saving roughly 25 a month on this one swap alone which over a year is not nothing.