I used my ancient found-in-a-free-pile-after-a-lawn-sale KitchenAid mixer to mix up the dough for the first time this thanksgiving. Then I just had to knead it (which I enjoy) and do the rest by hand. I’ve decided that I absolutely adore doing it this way, and I no longer desire a bread machine.
I meant to add, that the bread machine does have a bit of learning curve, so if you get one, expect a couple of bad loaves while you tinker with the recipe. At least, that was my experience.
We’ve had a bread maker for half a year now and we love it. A recipe book was included. Don’t need any special mixes, just regular bulk stuff from grocery store. Every second day we make a whole wheat loaf to last a couple breakfasts. Much healthier than most store-bought stuff. We also make an oatmeal nut loaf on occasion. Every guest we’ve had that has tried it has always wondered were we get such wonderful bread. Yes, the loaves don’t look as good as store bought or other home-made breads, but that is not a concern for us.
We also use our breadmaker for pretzel doughs and there are recipes for jams and marmalades that we haven’t tried yet (which are supposed to be slightly runnier than normal preserves).
My first serious kitchen experience involved baking bread from scratch, so I’m highly suspicious of these newfangled breadbaking machines. They make me feel like John Henry.
Daniel
My experience with mine is much as Cranky’s is - use it, put it away for awhile - use it, put it away for awhile. It gets the most use at Christmas - I make over a dozen loaves to include in various gift baskets. If I had to bake bread from scratch, we’d never eat another sandwich - I can NOT bake bread. There’s a genetic mixup or something there - I just can’t do it. 
I absolutely loved my bread machine, it lasted for 2 years before it died. I tended to make bread twice a week, just because you cannot buy good bread around here, and I’m a vegetarian and i eat my fair share of bread.
If I could afford it, I would buy another one today…hey if any of you folks who are tired of yours want to sell it … 
For us, the bread machine is what makes routine boring meals special. Spaghetti night we do a loaf of white bread, and turn it into garlic bread. I can set up the whole split pea soup/heavy wheat bread feast before leaving for work in the morning, and with the combined miracles of bread machine and crock pot, it’s all ready when we get home that evening. Added bonus: the house smells amazingly good.
Another added bonus; we live in Tucson. We can make bread during the summer without cranking up the oven and making the house uninhabitably hot.
No mixes, just bulk flour. Oh, and buy lots of raisins. We tend to make cinnamon raisin bread a lot.
I like to make bread by hand, and usually get better results than with the machine–that said, I use mine all the time to make pizza dough. Occasionally I’ll use it to mix up cinnamon rolls or something like that. I find that the stuff that’s baked in the bread machine pan has an odd texture, so I nearly always just let it knead and rise in the machine and shape it by hand and bake it in the oven. Nearly always–sometimes it’s nice to just throw the stuff in the machine and pull out bread a few hours later.
I use bulk flour and yeast, though as others have said, it takes some experimenting to learn the right proportions, even if you’re following a bread machine recipe. I got my recipe book free from Fleishman’s, I ordered it off the back of a yeast packet, but all the recipes in it are online at breadworld.com. I could stand to find some new ones, I should go looking. Mmm, fresh bread…
You gotta love the bread machine. It takes all of 30 seconds of my labor to make. You can of course use regular non-prepackaged ingredients but personally I like the ready to make kits. Drop it all inthe mixer, add some water and whatever else…voila!
I have a toaster oven/breadmaker combo, which satisfies my need to have machines that do more than just one thing. We use it as a toaster oven all the time, and as a breadmaker just occasionally. I find my mixer does a better job of initially mixing the ingredients for yeast breads, so I mix the ingredients with that and once it becomes dough, I pop it in the breadmaker, set it and forget it until the timer goes off. It makes normal-looking loaves of bread that are just as good as what I can make myself. It comes in handy since the only times I tend to make bread is when we are having a big meal and the oven is already in use.
We have now had the same bread maker for over 10 years, and it’s seen quite a bit of use.
We started with the kits, but decided to try making our own.
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You most likely will end up making some “bricks” at first. Something isn’t quite right, and you end up with all the bread, but one quarter of the space. But since the ingredents for basic bread are really cheap, toss it out, and try again.
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If you decide you like making your own, consider setting up containers of the ingredents, to make it easier. We had 1 of flour, sugar, salt, dried milk, yeast… Each had it’s own measuring cup or spoon in it all the time, so all we had to do is measure and press the button.
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Be careful of old yeast. If you are getting non-rising loaves a lot, you may have old yeast. Try some new stuff.
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If you live in someplace dry, or someplace that gets cold in the winter (so that heating the air in your house makes the air dry) you may have to add a little bit of extra water. The dry ingredents seem to get drier in the winter, and the dough will look kind of dry and cracked.
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If you like lighter bread, try adding an extra egg, or some high gluten flour. Both of these will give the dough an extra elasticity that lets it rise higher.
If you decided to play with altering recipies, consider starting a log of what you did, and how it turned out. That way you can go back and see what worked so you can do it again.
I used to have one - it was pretty good. I would thoroughly recommend making pizza dough in a bread maker if you have one that is capable of it - best damn pizza’s that I have ever made.
On the down side, I found that I put on a bit of weight over the time that I was using bread maker. Probably has something to do with the Pizza’s.