The Cheapest Boba Tea Franchises to Open, Ranked

Boba tea is a popular food-franchise category going into 2026, and it comes with two traps that trip up would-be owners before cost even enters the conversation. The first is that several of the most recognizable boba names do not franchise to individual buyers at all. The second is that almost no boba franchisor publishes its actual costs, so nearly every number you find online is a third-party estimate. This guide handles both head-on: it names the brands you cannot open, then ranks the ones you can by their reported investment, with the tracker caveat attached to every figure.

Because no major boba franchisor publishes its FDD figures, every dollar amount below is tracker-sourced and should be confirmed in the brand’s current Franchise Disclosure Document. Cheapest means lowest reported cost to open, not the franchise fee alone, and never an earnings figure.

First, the boba brands you cannot actually open

Before any cost table, clear the misconceptions, because chasing a brand that does not franchise wastes months. Boba Guys, one of the best-known names in the category, is company-owned, and its founders have said publicly that they do not franchise and do not plan to. There is no application, no FDD, and no franchise fee, because there is no franchise being sold. Machi Machi is a subtler case: it operates on a master-franchise or country-partner model and has had essentially no single-unit US franchising, so it is looking for large regional partners, not an individual buyer opening one shop.

Two more names to handle with care. ViVi Bubble Tea and Ten Ren’s Tea both market themselves as seeking franchisees, but we could not verify current, franchisor-backed cost figures for either against a recent FDD, so we leave them off the ranking rather than publish stale or unverifiable numbers. If you are drawn to any of these brands, the move is to contact the company directly and ask for a current FDD before you assume you can buy one.

The cheapest boba franchises that genuinely franchise to US buyers

All six of these brands do accept new US franchise applications, confirmed on their own sites in August 2026. What they will NOT tell you is what it costs. This table is deliberately not a ranking, because four of the six publish no fee, no investment range and no royalty anywhere on their own websites, so any ordering by price would be an ordering of third-party guesses. Bold figures are published by the franchisor itself; everything else is genuinely absent at the source.

Brand	Franchise fee	Total investment	Royalty	What the franchisor itself publishes
Kung Fu Tea	$37,000 (traditional); non-traditional “Upon Request”	$140,000 to $422,000 traditional; $123,000 to $275,000 non-traditional	Not published	Fee and both format ranges, on its own site
Sharetea	Not published, “Varies By Territory”	$300,000 minimum, with $100,000 minimum liquid capital	Not published	Investment minimum and liquid capital only
Gong Cha	Not published	Its own two pages disagree: “$100,000” for a small kiosk rising to “$350,000+” for a flagship, versus “$207,450 to $648,460” per single unit	Not published, FAQ says only that fees are “highly competitive”	Conflicting investment figures, nothing else
CoCo Fresh Tea & Juice	Not published	Not published	Not published	Nothing. Its page lists the headings, then says terms are given “during interview”
Happy Lemon	Not published	Not published	Not published	Nothing. Three store formats named by square footage, no dollar figures
Möge Tee	Not published	Not published	Not published	Nothing

For a wider view of the category, our five-brand comparison sets out what each franchisor actually publishes, and the answer is mostly nothing: only one of the five discloses a royalty rate you can verify.

A few honest notes on that table. Of the brands in the table above, Kung Fu Tea is the only one publishing both a fee and an investment range on its own site, and it publishes two ranges because it sells two formats: a traditional store at $140,000 to $422,000 and a non-traditional one at $123,000 to $275,000. It is also the category’s largest US franchisor. Treat single blended boba ranges you see elsewhere with suspicion; a figure that sits between a brand’s two real formats is the price of nothing you can actually buy. Sharetea’s widely-quoted $300,000 is real but is routinely mislabeled: its own site calls that the minimum TOTAL INVESTMENT, not a net worth requirement, and states a separate $100,000 minimum in liquid capital. Gong Cha’s own two franchise pages disagree with each other, so both are shown rather than averaged.

Cheapest is a filter, not the answer

In boba more than most categories, cost is the last thing to check, not the first. Start by confirming the brand franchises to a single-unit US buyer at all, because several popular names do not. Then, because every figure is tracker-sourced, verify the real fee, investment, and royalty in the current FDD. Only after those two checks does comparing entry cost, and the roughly 6 percent royalty most of these brands charge, actually mean something.

Use the ranking to build a shortlist, then request the FDD, read Item 7 for the true investment and Item 6 for the recurring fees with a franchise attorney, and confirm the brand is recruiting in your area. For other low-cost concepts, see our food franchises under $25K guide and the cheapest pizza franchises breakdown, and for the closely related frozen category, our ice cream and dessert franchise guide.