Verdict. Buy one today. Nothing else in a kitchen improves consistency this much for the money, and volume measurement of flour is genuinely unreliable.

A cup of flour weighs anywhere from 120 g to 155 g depending on whether it was scooped, spooned, sifted or settled. That is a swing of nearly 30 %, which in a cake batter is the difference between tender and tough. No amount of technique compensates for not knowing how much flour you added.

What to look for

1 g resolution, 5 kg capacity. The common 3 kg limit is tight once you weigh a heavy pot.
A tare button that responds instantly. This is the feature you will use fifty times a week.
Auto-off that is 3 minutes or longer, or ideally disableable. Two minutes is enough to shut down while you are fetching an egg, and then you have lost your running total.
Flat, wipeable surface. Textured plastic collects flour paste.

What not to pay for

Bluetooth, apps, “nutritional analysis” modes, and anything that requires a proprietary charger. A scale is a strain gauge and a display; the parts that break are the button membrane and the battery contacts, and no amount of software helps with either.

The 0.1 g question

A second, small scale reading to 0.1 g is genuinely useful if you bake bread — yeast and salt at bakers’ percentages are small numbers, and 1 g resolution means ±50 % error on 2 g of yeast. It is a £10 purchase and it is the only duplicate tool worth owning.