[plorkyeran]

I'm at 16k miles on my current road bike and the only maintenance I've done on my hydraulic disc brakes is swap the pads, which takes five minutes and requires no special tools. I assume at some point I'll need to have the brakes bled, but a $50 service task every 20k miles is not actually a meaningful expense relative to everything else.

[JohnFen]

The problem with having a shop do the work isn't the expense, it's the time. At least in my area, bike shops typically have several days to a week of backlog, so if you take your bike in, you have to be prepared to not have your bike for a week or so.

That's a big deal for me.