Cost is just one part of the bigger picture, right?

I hear you, @christopherwilliams, that cheap food can really make the week drag.

My cousin in a tiny Brooklyn apartment swears by hers. I was skeptical about the whole no-rot thing, but the liquid fertilizer for houseplants is legit. You just gotta be strict about that daily drain.

Yeah, the BeFree's bottle is flexible, but the actual filter part is still a hollow fiber that can get crushed. I read a gear review that said the real tank for coastal trips is the MSR Guardian. It's a brick, but it's built around a tough plastic housing and a ceramic element that's way harder to crack than a Sawyer. You pay for it, but it's the one they use for military stuff. Boiling water on a trail like that is a total pain, so a bulletproof filter is worth the weight.

People forget that power adapters are their own little machines with parts that fail. That fuse is there for a reason, usually a power surge or a bad outlet. It's a cheap part designed to die so the expensive console doesn't. Makes you wonder how many working consoles got trashed over a two dollar piece of wire.