alt Hacker Newsyeah i mostly agree, especially compared to subsidized subscription cost.
But for a heavy user who has enough work to be done so that the box runs almost 24/7 at say 50tok/sec, the math gets interesting against API prices.
And it can be interesting compared to subscription in the sense that you don't have the quota anymore. That means there's probably a lot of things you're not doing because of the quotas that you could do now.
It depends heavily on the tok/sec obviously and the very best solution financially remains subscriptions. But the idea remains entertaining and not that disconnected from reality
At 50tps for single stream you are going to get 50 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 130M out tokens of GLM 5.3 Flash...
That's less than what 40$ at current API rates... So if you are willing to pay 200$ per month you will get much better limits paying API rates.
You can't run large Kimi K3 models on 10K worth of hardware either way, you need to spend like 50K USD minimum.
Just pay for the API rates or get a low cost provider that uses higher batching, you can get shittier tps but much better prices, probably go as low as 20$ for as much usage as you can ever get from a 10K USD machine from GLM 5.3 Flash...
The issue is nothing expensive runs on these devices and cheap stuff isn't worth running locally, eletricity costs ~12cents/kwh in us iirc, so at 330W M5 Ultra will burn around 8 * 0.12 = ~1$ per day extra in electricity so the electricity is going to cost you the same as the API rates(30$ per month).
I truly don't think you are accounting for the costs here properly. But again if money truly doesn't matter it's much better for privacy and better than paying one of the shady AI labs who are doing god knows what with your data.