I do tig and stick, but not mig. However, if it is a high priced inverter unit, my experience with Miller was that the cost structure made no sense for home shops. Their deal is good units to commercial shops that need lots of service and where the machine pays for itself quickly. I have heard of horror stories where someone buys a machine that cost them 4K and they get some glitch down the road a few years, and the repair bill is out of the world. For the commercial shop, they would have run by that road marker, a few weeks into the use, but for the guy who loves his hobby and makes a few bikes a year, his machine is comparatively sitting around. The reason it would have suited him to have the high end machine was that he does hobby stuff which is not running the same weld every second, and he likes the feature set on the Miller which is like a Ferrari.

This kind of issue was not a big deal back before inverters, because those machines were tanks. But with complex computer processing, you may get a machine that lasts you for ever (nobody is complaining about quality), but the price to insurance (warrantee, service help) just isn't reasonable. I bought a Chinese machine. I did sell my Maxstar for a lot of money, because you could just look at it and tell it was basically new.

If I didn't weld bicycles, I would be perfectly happy with my HF169 dollar inverter stick welder. I can make anything I need for the shop or house. takes up very little space, and turns out nice work. No argon which is a pain to get around here). I bought a back up for it for 98 Canadian. It is crazy how good these little boxes are. The duty cycle is fine for me, where it would be pathetic for a business. My TIG machine looks like the console in a fighter jet, and one could do amazing things with it in stick also. But the little box is so easy to use, I reach for it almost all the time I am not welding thin tube 4130.