Before I moved into my current place, I learned about how to carbonate soda at home after seeing SodaStream's (at the time called Soda Club) Being able to produce a liter of seltzer for 20-25 cents and not needing to carry the bottles home seemed like a great idea with 1L bottles of seltzer running about $1 in the grocery store. Also not needing to store bottles is handy, as one charge produces about 60L. The initial investment for a machine priced on Amazon is about $100 for a starter kit, plus another $65 for a spare CO2 tank, and $20 for a 2-pack of 1L carbonation bottles. Total about $185 which includes the gas for your first 120 liters of soda.
The idea looked cool but there weren't any local places to exchange tanks and it bothered me that I had to use their proprietary system (paintball tank fills, about the same size, ran $2-3 a fill versus $15 for the soda stream) also, there was no promise that the company would be around in a few years to keep exchanging the tanks via mail. This has since changed and even Staples exchanges tanks at many of their stores.
After doing some research, I discovered this site
which covered the basics of the science behind carbonation as well as a straightforward build to carbonate at home. My mk I build ( http://www.atroxen.com/tsaro/index.php?id=soda ) was essentially this setup, a 20lb CO2 tank, regulator and misc fittings to feed gas into a soda bottle for carbonation. I highly recommend this site for more information than you ever wanted to know about home carbonation. Instead of 20-25 cents a liter, this setup costs about 2-3 cents a liter. A 20lb fill of CO2 locally costs me about $30 at a welding shop and contains about 40x the gas of a Soda Stream refill for twice the cost. So each 20lb fill saves me about $570 versus carbonating with the Soda Stream. My first build ran about $130 for the CO2 tank and first 20lb fill, $50 for a regulator, and another $20 for misc tubing and hardware, about $200 total.
I've since expanded my system to carbonate a 5 gallon soda keg instead of doing soda in 1-2L batches and added a soda gun to dispense. I've since moved and no longer have the chest freezer in my kitchen, which makes storing soda syrups difficult so the gun currently just dispenses still or sparkling water.
If you're a home beer brewer and want to move to a keg/draft setup, this option is an obvious choice, just get a double regulator (slightly more expensive but not more than an extra $20 or $30) so you can have different pressures for beer and soda. I currently have an under-bar fridge that can hold 2 5 gallon cornelius, one for beer, one for seltzer.
Buying a soda stream is a very good choice versus buying from the grocery store, provided you have good water or can filter your own tap water. You save about 75% of the cost which will pay for the machine and spare bottles, cylinders, etc relatively quickly if you drink a fair bit of seltzer.
If you don't mind moving heavier tanks and working with high pressure gasses, you can save even more, about 98% of the cost over store bought, or 92% over the Soda Stream, and the first 20lb fill will cover $570 worth of additional fills over the Soda Stream.
Either option saves substantially and pays for itself versus grocery store seltzer rather quickly. I stopped counting when the savings covered the cost of my bar, beer brewing equipment, beer draft equipment and initial setup cost versus buying store bought.
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