Software Cliches
“Bake it in” is one of the more common cliches heard from companies that sell multiple parts of a solution. The cliche stems from the concept of baking a cake for instance. Add all of the ingredients — some necessary, some not — and the result is that you can’t discern one ingredient from the other in the final product.
People usually “bake in” individual line items in a deal to hide the very existence, but usually it’s to create a grey cloud around the price of the item in question.
Creating solutions this way is not always a bad thing nor should it be alarming necessarily. Some customers don’t care about the actual process to completion as long as the end result is what was negotiated.
As long as the individual ingredients have no long lasting ramifications, “baking it in” isn’t such a bad thing.