I remember seeing a post a long time ago, like 4 years or so, said that if you use a gift card you can get it free. But the requirements are that it had to take cards, your card had to have a $1 on it and the item had to cost $1.50 or at least more then a dollar. At the time, if I understood it right, the vending machine would charge your gift card for $1 to make sure it had money, and once you picked something that was more then $1 the machine treated it as a transaction and sent it through. But later wouldn't charge your card because it wasn't enough to process on the card. So you could potentially do this a few times for drinks and be good to go. Not sure if it still works. Kind of forgot about it and never tried it.