As an avid coffee drinker, I often find myself running up small fortunes at Starbucks to get my morning fix, and decided that perhaps I should invest in a personal coffee brewing machine to keep at my desk to brew my own coffee. I shopped around on the Internet and came across a model sold by well-known coffee company Gevalia, which brews a single cup (10oz.) of coffee and was quite affordable. The unit is called the Gevalia Coffee For One Personal unit, and is priced at $11.97, plus shipping, or free with a subscription to Gevalia's Coffee of the Month Club.
The device comes in either white or black and is compact, easily fitting onto any spare surface in a workplace or on a desk. It is essentially a hot plate, heating up the water in the chamber and filtering it through the top as a normal size percolator would do. It takes about five minutes to brew a single cup. One feature that is quite useful to the unit is that is has a reusable filter in which the coffee grounds are deposited, making the need for coffee filters a thing of the past. Once the coffee is done brewing, one simply rinses the ground out of the filter, rinse the filter itself, allow it to air dry and it is cleaned and ready for the next usage. It does not require a lot of coffee grounds, perhaps only a tablespoon or so, making a single bag of coffee last quite a while for one person. The filter is also large enough to accept single coffee pods of grounds measured for one cup meant to be used for single cup brewings by such companies as Folgers.
The unit comes with a matching mug, although it is tall enough to accept any standard sized mug. The device can also be used for brewing tea bags as well. As with brewing coffee, the user pours the correct amount of water into the chamber, but instead of adding coffee grounds, allows the water to simply heat up and dispense into the cup, to which can be added a tea back for steeping.

The Gevalia unit is by far the best priced unit of this kind that I could find. Other units usually come in at about $30 or so. There are no fancy features or settings, one simply plugs the device in and lets it do its work. Thus far, my own unit has been pretty reliable, although a coworker had her heating element on hers burn out after about two years of fairly heavy usage. However, my own experience with the Gevalia coffee maker has been quite wonderful.