Hendzel is obsessed with one thing at a time.

The Mac Mini in my hallway renders more video per dollar than every cloud-based render service I've tried. Twice as fast as Remotion in the cloud. Quieter than my laptop. Cheaper than two coffees a month to run.

The obsession isn't the hardware. It's how badly priced the cloud-rendering market is, and what else I might be overpaying for by default. I keep finding things — backups, audio transcription, image generation — that work better, cheaper, and more reliably on a $700 box on a shelf than on someone else's GPUs.

There's a piece in here about the end of "cloud by default" for small teams. I'll write it eventually. For now I'm just measuring everything I run and seeing where the numbers don't add up.