Yes, the tunnel vision around local models on this site is crazy. The percentage of people in the world who can afford the hardware is extremely low.

I keep coming back to this: why do I need to run a local model on my own GPU? Open models can run in dedicated clouds and while, yeah, they may be more expensive per token than my own GPU, when accounting for depreciation, energy usage, and opportunity cost (money not spent on my GPU will instead sit in my portfolio appreciating with its particular blend of returns), I'm pretty sure I break even or even net lose money with a GPU.

Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to a fully local model in that, I can have agents looping 24/7 even when my internet is not working. But this is niche enough that if I had to price the advantages they don't seem worth it.

If I'm willing to pay the Openrouter tax, I can fire up Openrouter today and just get access to whatever model I want, and still pay a fraction for tokens as what I'm paying with the big guys.

My single 3080 runs so hot I don't need to warm my room in winter, and have to play games in my underwear in summer.

Unless you value privacy, pay for openrouter. You still get the benefits of cheap tokens and programmatic usage.

3090 pricing is something of a wild card. Since the only big-mem consume cards are the xx90s, and a 5090 is pushing $5000, resale value has gone way up. The bottom hit ~$700 last year. It's still a very good GPU, if power hungry.