It pays off instantly, because OpenAI/Anthropic can no longer see what I'm doing and that's worth a lot of money to me. If I am offloading some of my thought processes to a machine, I want to own that machine. Otherwise, it's like if someone else owns a part of my mind and has a backdoor into my mind.
I doubt it will ever be cost effective for the foreseeable future. The AI companies have astonishing amounts of compute and they’re effectively dumping it on the market.
43 years to break even on Qwen 3.8 at 25% the speed of the API, lol. I like the idea of local models for really small tasks like automation/toolcalling, but it will probably never make sense for coding. I tried them and it was just excruciating compared to what you get for $100 a month from a subscription.
Local LLMs are not really about saving money, they're about autonomy. Choose the exact model you want, fine-tune it if you want, and no one can take it away from you.
I have a home server running vibed applications. VPS host would cost $25/mo or $300/yr.
Mac mini can also build iOS applications. I think if you’re a mobile dev, you can have concurrent builds for your agents instead of everyone waiting on a single machine to finish.
-- Warren Buffett
Mac mini can also build iOS applications. I think if you’re a mobile dev, you can have concurrent builds for your agents instead of everyone waiting on a single machine to finish.