[alwa]

Flour, salt, and water are exceedingly cheap. I have to imagine the loaf of bread I buy from my baker reflects considerably more than a 50x markup compared to baking my own.

It’s a lot cheaper than me learning to bake as well as he does—not to mention dedicating the time every day to get my daily bread—and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.

[mediaman]

Bread is a great example! You can buy a loaf for $3-4. It is not a 50x markup. Like growing your own veggies, baking bread is for fun, not for economics.

But the cloud is different. None of the financial scale benefits are passed on to you. You save serious money running it in-house. The arguments around scale have no validity for the vast, vast majority of use cases.

Vercel isn't selling bread: they're selling a fancy steak dinner, and yes, you can make steak at home for much less, and if you eat fancy steak dinners at fancy restaurants every night you're going to go broke.

So the key is to understand whether your vendors are selling you bread, or a fancy steak dinner, and to not make the mistake of getting the two confused.

[alwa]

That’s a tremendously clarifying framework, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you.

I wonder, though—at the risk of overextending the metaphor—what if I don’t have a kitchen, but I need the lunch meeting to be fed? Wouldn’t (relatively expensive) catering routinely make sense? And isn’t the difference between having steak catered and having sandwiches catered relatively small compared to the alternative of building out a kitchen?

What if my business is not meaningfully technical: I’ll set up applications to support our primary function, and they might even be essential to the meat of our work. But essential in the same way water and power are: we only notice it when it’s screwed up. Day-to-day, our operational competency is in dispatching vehicles or making sandwiches or something. If we hired somebody with the expertise to maintain things, they’d sit idle—or need a retainer commensurate with what the Vercels and Herokus of the world are charging. We only need to think about the IT stuff when it breaks—and maybe to the extent that, when we expect a spike, we can click one button to have twice as much “application.”

In that case, isn’t it conceivable that it could be worth the premium to buy our way out of managing some portion of the lower levels of the stack?

[thequux]

In that case, you don't want cloud; you want an MSP, whose core competence is running those IT services. They, in turn, have the skills to colo a rack at a DC or to manage rented servers, amortized across a number of clients.

In practice, there are two situations where cloud makes sense:

1. You infrequently need to handle traffic that unpredictably bursts to a large multiple of your baseline. (Consider: you can over provision your baseline infrastructure by an order of magnitude before you reach cloud costs) 2. Your organization is dysfunctional in a way that makes provisioning resources extremely difficult but cloud can provide an end run around that dysfunction.

Note that both situations are quite rare. most industries that handle that sort of large burst are very predictable: event management know when a client will be large and provision ticket sales infra accordingly, e-commerce knows when the big sale days will be, and so on. In the second case, whatever organizational dysfunction caused the cloud to be appealing will likely wrap itself around the cloud initiative as well.

[eru]

Please do yourself a flavour and check the price of flour.

Water is cheap, yes. Salt isn't all that cheap, but you only need a little bit.

> [...] and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.

If you need bread by hand, it's a very small scale affair. Your physique and time couldn't afford you large scale bread making. You'd a big special mixer and a big special oven etc for that. And you'd probably want a temperature and moisture controlled room just for letting your dough rise.

[alwa]

$16 for a 50 pound sack right now

https://postmates.com/store/restaurant-depot-4538-s-sheridan...

I blush to admit that I do from time to time pay $21 for a single sourdough loaf. It’s exquisite, it’s vastly superior to anything I could make myself (or anything I’ve found others doing). So I’m happy to pay the extreme premium to keep the guy in business and maintain my reliable access to it.

It weighs a couple of pounds, though I’m not clear how the water weight factors in to the final weight of a loaf. And I’m sure that flour is fancier than this one. I take your point—I don’t belong in the bread industry :)

[eru]

Well, in your case, you are mostly paying for the guy's labour, I presume.

(Similarly to how you pay Amazon or Google etc not just for the raw cloud resources, but for the system they provide.)

I grew up in Germany, but now live in Singapore. What's sold as 'good' sourdough bread here would make you fail your baker's training in Germany: huge holes in the dough and other defects. How am I supposed to spread butter over this? And Mischbrot, a mixture of rye and wheat, is almost impossible to find.

So we make our own. The goal is mostly to replicate the everyday bread you can buy in Germany for cheap, not to hit any artisanal highs. (Though they are massively better IMHO than anything sold as artisanal here.)

Interestingly, the German breads we are talking about are mostly factory made. Factory bread can be good, if that's what customers demand.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischbrot

Going on a slight tangent: with tropical heat and humidity, non-sourdough bread goes stale and moldy almost immediately. Sourdough bread can last for several days or even a week without going moldy in a paper bag on the kitchen counter outside the fridge, depending on how sour you go. If you are willing to toast your bread, going stale during that time isn't much of an issue either.

(Going dry is not much of an issue with any bread here--- sourdough or not, because it's so humid.)

[hwntw]

Where do you spend $21 for a loaf of sourdough?! My local baker sells a delicious loaf of artisanal sourdough for £4 here.

Of course, the difference between sourdough and anything else is astonishing, I just can't comprehend someone charging $21 for it!

[chickensong]

You can make amazing sourdough at home in a cast iron pot. It requires time, that's the nature of sourdough, but it's not hard once you learn how. I guarantee you could make bread as good or better for a dollar of ingredients!

[jandrewrogers]

> Salt isn't all that cheap

Wait, what? Salt is literally one of the cheapest of all materials per kilogram that exists in all contexts, including non-food contexts. The cost is almost purely transportation from the point of production. High quality salt is well under a dollar a pound. I am currently using salt that I bought 500g for 0.29 euro. You can get similar in the US (slightly more expensive).

This was a meme among chemical engineers. Some people complain in reviews on Amazon that the salt they buy is cut with other chemicals that make it less salty. The reality is that there is literally nothing you could cut it with that is cheaper than salt.

[eru]

Well, salt is more expensive than water.

But sure, it's cheap otherwise. Point granted.

One way or another, salt is not a major driver of cost in bread, because there's relatively little salt in bread. (If there's 1kg of flour, you might have 20g of salt.)

[tonyhart7]

bread ingreadient is cheap but the equipment that you need to do baking is not

also skills, some people just bake better than others

[eru]

> bread ingreadient is cheap but the equipment that you need to do baking is not

It's actually not too bad, if look at the capital cost of a bread factory amortised over each loaf of bread.

The equipment is comparatively more expensive for a home baker who only bakes perhaps two loafs a week.

[chickensong]

A comment in adjacent thread above mentioned paying $21 per-loaf! That could pay for the equipment needed to bake a couple loaves a week. You really don't need much besides a normal oven.

[chickensong]

Unless you're talking about the oven, the equipment isn't expensive.

Some skills are required, but it's really not that hard once you learn the technique and have done it a few times.