alt Hacker NewsEnjoyable analogy.
> Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider.
This makes it sound like buying brewed coffee is the budget option. But the real budget option I've seen is to brew at home. Almost any household will have an appliance to boil water. Then add instant coffee.
I don't understand why, but in my experience instant coffee seems to be the baseline even in coffee-producing countries.
I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.