2024-05-02: I've had my Kitchen Arm bread machine less than 2 months now and it's already payed for itself. Talk about a great return on investment! I love this machine! This is a fantastic way to make really good bread at about 1/5 to 1/8 the cost of far inferior store bought bread. I have been making bread with a bread machine for a long time. My first bread machine was a machine I purchased through Dak industries in the late '80s or the very early 90s. I have been purchasing bread machines ever since. I believe I have owned about 20 of them over the years. I have had many brands, and many loaf shapes and orientations. This Kitchen Arm machine far outshines anything I have ever had. It is very quiet and it makes excellent bread consistently. If you make your recipes by weighing your flour and water then you will get an excellent result every time. In addition to making bread this machine makes excellent dairy yogurt. My dairy yogurt recipe is 1/4 of a cup of good active yogurt + 880 milliliters of while milk. You can get started with a small amount of good store bought plain yogurt. The cost of my homemade yogurt is $3.49 for 4 quarts. {Basically the visit of a gallon of while milk } Compare that to about $7.00 per quart for sure bought yogurt. That's about 1/8 the cost. At this rate, I will have recouped the entire price of the bread machine by the time I've made 4 gallons of yogurt! It also makes good soy yogurt, that is much better than store bought at a far less cost than store bought. I'm still perfecting the recipe and will post it here when I get it just right. I haven't tried it yet, but this machine is also capable of making jams. Now for the best part. I believe I will be able to make a sourdough loaf using ONLY sourdough starter. No yeast! It has a programmable capability for custom-made breads. I have already made the sourdough recipe with yeast. The result was good sourdough bread, but I'm a purist. However, I'm not such a purist that I want to manage the labor and precision required to make 3 sourdough loaves a week by hand. (We eat a lot of bread.} Wish me luck! I will post back when I succeed. For most machines this review would stop here. Not for this machine though. What truly sets this machine apart is the customer service. They (Tony Simpson) reached out to me shortly after my purchase to make sure I was happy, offering to answer questions, offering to help fix any of my EXISTING PERSONAL bread recipes that weren't working with the machine, and offering tips. I had a few questions so I responded. I found that Tony is the hardest working customer service representative I have ever come across, or perhaps Tony Simpson is what everyone in the customer service department is called when communicating with customers. Regardless the customer service that comes with this bread machine manufacturer is outstanding! It effectively doubles or triples (or more,) the value of this machine. I don't think these guys have much of an advertising budget, so when you see them in these "ratings" websites, they are always in the mix but never at the top. I think that's because they don't have the money or desire to pay off these websites to rate them at the top. Even if these ratings websites are totally fair, they don't take into account customer service. This level of customer service would easily turn any review into the top rated review. You can ask Tony questions about improving your recipe, converting your recipe, why your recipe is failing etc. he always gets back to you in 24 hours with complete and accurate answers. Often there are insights that go beyond the original question. Outstanding! Get this machine. You will love it. ----- PS. Here is another example of how over the top customer oriented they are. You get 3 measuring cups, 3 measuring spoons, a paddle remover hook and an EXTRA BREAD PADDLE with the machine. ----- Here is a snippet from the original customer service email sent to me by Tony (I don't remember whether I had to sign up for this or if it was automatic.) .... My name is Tony, and I am the account representative of KitchenArm LLC. Thank you so much for signing up with kitchenarm.com. If you encounter any problems with our product, please don't hesitate to contact me by replying to this email at any time. Your customer service request will be carefully responded within 24 hours (usually less). I will do my best to resolve any product issues you might encounter and make you a happy customer. You might be interested in our free recipe personalization service which through our recipe development team can adjust your own recipe to a preset menu of the machine or provide you with the cycle settings for the Homemade menu.