Who says gift cards have to be a boring, impersonal holiday gift? For the second year running, Starbucks is selling a special handcrafted metal gift card for a price tag of $450. According to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek, the ubiquitous coffee chain began selling the laser-etched gift cards on Friday, December 6, and will continue selling them throughout the month. For the coffee obsessive, the cards – which look a bit like the concierge cards that airlines give to exceptionally frequent fliers – might just make the perfect gift.

Not that the premium Starbucks gift cards aren’t at least a little bit questionable. While the classy nature of the engraved cards certainly has a value in and of itself, the fact that each gift card costs $450 but only comes with $400 in Starbucks store credit calls into question whether or not it might just be more efficient for a gift giver to buy their coffee-loving friend or relative nine individual $50 gift cards.

Still, the fancy Starbucks gift cards must have an audience of some kind, not only because the coffee corporation decided to bring them back for the second year in a row, but also because – according to the company’s spokesperson – Starbucks actually loses money in the production of each card. Supposedly, the extra $50 doesn’t even cover the cost of production for one of the cards, all of which are made with “an artisan rose metal base” and handcrafted and laser-etched one by one. In addition, each card comes with the highest level Starbucks rewards membership possible, which probably also has a value of its own.

So why would Starbucks want to incur expense around the holiday season when people would probably already be buying gift cards for their loved ones anyway? For one thing, the designer gift cards ostensibly function as one big promotion for the coffee chain. For another, Starbucks makes the cards a controllable expense by only producing a finite number of them. Last year, the company manufactured 5,000 stainless steel cards, and according to the USA Today, they sold out in six minutes. These year, they’ve sliced the number by 80 percent, offering only 1,000 cards. In other words, those hoping to buy one of the $450 premium gift cards are probably already too late.

Running out of designer cards early might actually help Starbucks make even more gift card money this holiday season. The USA Today also claims that, last year, 1 in 10 adults received some sort of Starbucks gift card throughout the course of December. If Starbucks is selling fewer $450 gift cards this year, the coffee chain will probably also be selling more cards in other cash denominations.