Even at just the electricity cost openrouter will be both

1) Roughly break-even to a little bit cheaper per token cost 2) Much, much, faster

So the cost of the mac barely even matters, it's just an extra cost beyond.

Sure, data center providers can pay lower rates.

The point of this article is that LLMs at home really don't make a ton of sense, unless you are willing to pay through the nose for privacy. There is absolutely no cost saving to be had.

If you're looking at your own datacenter as a larger corporate client, that could change.

There are also some providers that will contractually keep your data private, like AWS Bedrock or parts of Google/Azure (I don't know their stack names).

AWS even has AWS Secret Region and AWS Top Secret Region if you want to use LLMs on classified data.

You have to value privacy at a roughly absurd level to not want to use LLMs run efficiently at scale by someone else. For the home user, just the extra efficiency produced by batching requests from a large number of users in a datacenter in a real win.

Some of these companies are even selling tokens below cost to get marketshare. If someone will sell you a service for a dollar bill or three quarters, why wouldn't you take the three quarters?

Plus your privacy.

Not always. The calculations take its useful life expectancy as an input. If they estimate it correctly you have highly likelihood of it breaking, burning out or being woefully out of date by the end. At the 10 year window you are looking at losing support for security updates.

So if you are lucky you might end up with something that still runs but most folks won't find it particularly useful

Yea this; it’s the same reason why mortgaging is cheaper than renting