A simple example.

I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS.

I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details).

It runs Qwen3.5:9b and glm5.2-ocr with Ollama and uses about 10GB of RAM. It automatically releases the models from RAM after 5 minutes of inactivity so it is pretty seamless to leave running in the background.

All the details are stored in a simple webapp with a SQLite db that I can search through.

> it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me.

The $20/month subs are much stronger than the local models you can run, even with how far local models have advanced lately.

The appeal of local models is that the data never leaves your network so you can feel safer putting sensitive content into it. It also feels “free” to use when you’ve already paid for the hardware.

But it doesn’t perform better and if you do the math you’re probably not saving money either. It’s helpful for things that you can’t or don’t want to outsource to a 3rd party.

>I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RTX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me.

I just ordered a new Mac Studio M5 Max 128GB $5899 ($6400 with tax) to be able to run the bigger "consumer size" models in the 70B parameter range (~96 GB). That said, I have no illusions that this expensive setup with a Qwen Flash coding LLM will be comparable to a $20/month subscription. Even upgrading to an even more expensive Mac Ultra 256GB for $10000 to hold a bigger model still won't be comparable. Apple hasn't shipped my Mac yet and I'm still considering cancelling it and downgrading to a smaller 64GB RAM config ($4299) to save $1600.

Why did I initially spend the extra $1600 if I knew ahead of time that it wasn't as good as cloud AI? Because I thought I could use some local LLM for the easy tasks or when I hit cloud rate limits. No issues with privacy so that wasn't part of the motivation at all. I just wanted some local AI capability to augment a subscription. I've not totally convinced myself of the cost/benefit of this.

Based on today's consumer hardware landscape, you're paying very high prices for crippled capability compared to the cloud AI subscriptions. We're also in a transition period where the next iteration of hardware improvements have some compelling features for local AI. Apple's upcoming M7 (2027 or 2028) is anticipated to have better GPU and neural engine to help with prefill TTFT. AMD Strix Halo is about to release 192GB system which is a big upgrade to their current 128GB ai pc. Maybe apply my $1600 savings towards those newer products. Those future products will still be very expensive but maybe the cost/benefit will be better.

A huge benefit of local setups at our studio is that a lot of our software can't run headless, so when we're having agents work in Blender or in Unity etc with MCP that'd otherwise eat up our normal computer use. (Try to have two people try to work in the same Unity editor at once... then try ten!)

We also built some QA agents that are always playing our games from the same builds a player would and flagging things to fix/improve; that alone needs the game focused and front-and-center so it can properly screen-capture for deciding what inputs to take next (and for screenshots/replays), which also means we can't really do any hands-on work at all on the machine when it's running.

Having a separate (and tiny) machine for all of this has been great. We don't bother with local models because, you're right, the $20/month sub is way better than anything that can run on small consumer hardware atm.

I’ve been running DeepSeek 4 Flash, Qwen 27B and Qwen 9B on local hardware. They work well for coding and document review tasks. I think Qwen 9B local on a 5090 might be legitimately helpful for small task agents in omp, since it is ridiculously fast. But my motivation is that I have data that I unfortunately can’t share with 3rd parties.

I have been eyeing a 512 GB Mac 5 Ultra to run full DS4 pro locally, which I expect would be pretty amazing as far as quality/recall. The only downside is that the speed is a lot slower than something like 27B on the 5090.

Image and Video gen is superior locally, because you can tweak more, use LoRAs, use whatever model fine tunes, and generate uncensored content, plus as you're often cherry picking from multiple gens it ends up being cheaper for comparable quality as well.

Local coding is a step down but good enough for a lot of things if you have privacy concerns.

In my limited experience, not quite yet but we are damn close. Qwen 3.8 27b is it. If I could run this as a decent speed, I would no longer need cloud models at all. I'm actually currently trying it out in the cloud to pay for the inference speed but the model is fully runnable at home.

I realistically costs $5-10k to replicate a ChatGPT like agent. And it doesn't scale.

That's still really close. And models and quantization etc keep improving.

I'm absolutely positive that I'll be switching to mostly local AI in the next 5 years.

Local inference can't compete with cloud on speed, intelligence and economics. It's all about freedom, privacy, control, sovereignty.

It's about not having to accept any of the stupid "terms" of the corporations. It's about doing things the big labs don't allow you to do, like cybersecurity stuff, or even just chatting with the AI about some wrongthink.

What models you running? What effort level?

Wild oversimplification, and benchmarks vary widely, but I've read a lot of benchmarks suggesting that Qwen3.8-27B (xhigh effort) competes with near-frontier models at a lot of coding tasks. To the best of my understanding it's not going to run very feasibly in 16GB of VRAM at usable quants however.

r/LocalLLM and r/LocalLlama are noisy, but valuable sources of anecdata if you have the time (or the tokens, hah) to comb through them. You are going to see a lot of modest setups there, and also guys with $20K+ of hardware.

The two things (besides my bank account) that keep me from investing heavily in local are (1) we are not guaranteed to get a steady release of open models in the future (2) a lot of the "fun" stuff LLM stuff that interests me involves orchestrating lots of parallel agents, which of course multiples the hardware you need to achieve it.

For example, I've been having good results having both Sol and Opus review the same PR, and then I have them cross-review each others' PRs. A next step I'd like to consider is maybe having a swarm of Luna agents review the same PR and have them fight it out... maybe with Sol doing final arbitration? I suspect 5-10 Lunas might outperform a single Opus. Or maybe not. But at any rate, that would be impractical in a homelab without a pretty big hardware (or time) budget.

It's not that far off anymore. On my 7900 XTX 24GB, I can run Qwen3.8 27B with 131K context at Q4_K_M (55 tok/s with MTP). Excluding hardware cost, it's about $0.02 tok/M in and $0.40 tok/M out (cached in $0.0001). On OpenRouter, that would cost more than 10x what it actually costs me.

Of course, 131k context at 4-bit quant is a trade off, but even then, it's VERY capable. It doesn't feel that far behind something like GPT 5.6 Luna.

Local setups aren't going to make sense purely from a cost perspective, and definitely not when you are buying Apple hardware. AI subscriptions are too highly subsidized right now.

I'm using a Mac to do bulk diarized transcription (STT). Most services run in the $.05-1.00+ per hour of transcribed audio.

My Mac can do ~200x realtime (1 hour takes 20s or so). I can do several thousand hours per day. Its pretty incredible

Not sure how much that qualifies as AI vs LLM usage, but it seems to work pretty good

One use case I find cost effective is using it as a voice assistant for Home Assistant. API pricing on models is very weird compared to the normal chats, so I use Qwen/GPT-OSS on my Mac Studio via llama.cpp server.

Also, the $20/month subscriptions are HEAVILY subsidized, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison really

For software development tasks, Qwen 3.8 27B is genuinely excellent, but you need 32+ GB of VRAM to run it well with decent context, and enough memory bandwidth and compute to run it at a decent pace. With an M5 Max Mac Studio, you can do that decently well.

From what I’ve been seeing, the Mac studios do look like they have potential. I was looking to drop $10k-$15k on one until recently. After comparing a Radeon 7900 XTX vs Ryzen Halos 128GB vs M1 MacBook Pro 64Gb, I landed on just getting an external closure setup with Nvidia RTX 5090.

The model I’m specifically targeting to use at high speeds is Qwen 3.8 27b @q4ks. This model actually proved to be good at coding (it sits somewhere between Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 capability). M1 got 10 tok/s, Ryzen Halo 20tok/s, and Radeon 7900 XTX 50tok/s (can only do 128k context window in Radeon card).

The prefill gets extremely slow around 50k tokens in context window (whatever prompt processing stage entails could be wrong about phases here). It takes about 2 hours to fill the context.

Even with a drafter model intended for speed instead of mtp, I can’t get past 70tok/s, still is extremely slow to process prompts as context grows, and drops down to 40-50tok/s anyway making this config still moot for improvement on my Radeon card.

The only thing I can point to slowing me down is bandwidth of the card itself.

I am waiting to actually get my 5090 right now and I am betting that the 1700 Gbps of capacity will fix my prompt processing speeds. I don’t need full PCIe lane bandwidth to serve my house I just need to load the full model into vRAM and let the GPU do its thing.

Additional benefit to the external enclosure route is being able to migrate the inference between devices more easily. I can develop out the infrastructure then migrate the card to be hooked up to a shared node in the house with all the tools necessary for my family to take advantage of the privacy enhancement that comes with local inference.

The article implies the demand is for running locally. I’m not convinced, at least with a mac minis. Most people I know and myself buy the mini as it is always on, easy to setup, and isolated from my main computer which is a laptop. The mini is driving the use of the $20/month subscriptions.

I think 24gb is the bare minimum for a local qwen3.8 based setup. I've used qwen3.6 and it's not as straightforward as "can it replace <insert the most cost-effective cloud solution today>"

Local llms don't suffer from cloud availability issues. Anyone that used Google models know that sometimes they just don't have capacity whatsoever, at least that was the state of things some months back when I used them. Just bear in mind if needed, cloud providers will prioritise API and corporate customers over subscriptions if availability degrades more.

Also they don't have the same guardrails as the other models, so for hacking, reverse engineering and black coding (piracy etc...) these local models might be the only options.

16GB VRAM could load a small quantised qwen 27B model but it would be a ways away from a frontier cloud model.

Though keep in mind not being beholden to shenanigans from said cloud companies (and interference from government entities!) is definitely worth something intangible.

The principle of KISS keeps coming to mind when I consider local computing. I'm looking forward to the day we can just run Opus-level models at 100 tok/sec on consumer hardware.

But currently it's really hard to beat anything offered by the cloud companies. And the cost and complexity of setting it all up, just to barely (if at all) touch on Opus-level intelligence makes it seem like we're not quite there for the common man (enthusiasts are a different story.)

I am very excited for open source local models, and we're nearly there, but it's still too complex and expensive to be my daily driver (yet).

I was looking at $10k Mac Studio with M5 Ultra and 256 GB for local experiments, but then struggled to find what really good modern model I can fit into it. Yes, it can run a good dense 27B at Q8 with plenty of context, but what beyond that? IIUC, some Deepseek flash variants at Q4 are also feasible, but I am not sure if the quality will be good. They also don’t run that fast, like about 30 t/s

So if I stay within 35B, especially MOE, my M5 Pro 64GB MBP can also run them well, and it can do plenty of other stuff too including gaming. While 256 GB with such RAM bandwidth and powerful GPU sounds like fun on paper, it doesn’t seem to be the next level compared to 64 GB

Really curious what people run on 256 GB Macs

I have a RX 9070 also. I run llama-swap with a fill-in-middle 7B model, local 9B model, and it proxies up to OpenRouter for the bigger stuff. I think that's where the sweet spot is right now.

I've spent $2 in the last 2 weeks on OpenRouter. I've been trying to only use the medium sized models that I would otherwise be able to run on a nice local setup. That nice local setup would cost ~$4k. I don't know what the operating cost would be, but I would be concerned that my home electricity would cost more than at a datacenter. It just doesn't make sense right now except for privacy reasons.

I'm probably going to hoarde open weights models in the ~31B range until memory costs fall in a few years. Then, I'll buy some hardware to run at home just so I feel more sovereign over my stack regardless the cost/token speed.

Right now sweet spot is voice transcription. Meeting recording apps are genuinely better locally than in cloud. Can run on an M1 easily. Latency matters. I built https://github.com/scosman/Biscotti and see zero reason to use cloud ever again.

LLMs are harder: not much useful below 12B, and the 700B+ ones are really much better. Models like Qwen 3.8 27b show promise: in a few years pretty good local AI should be in reach for anyone willing to buy a $1000 computer (but who knows what your $20 sub buys you then).

In my experience so far, separately from privacy concerns there's a specific use case where cheap local shines--when unlimited shots on /goal with a dumber model is better than limited time with a smarter model. This looks less like the assisted-coding scenario that's commonly brought up as a good local scenario, because if you're searching for a fast and accurate solution to a single blocking problem, the bare minimum for a model that can do that is a 24GB dGPU or a 64GB Mac. Instead, this looks more like a Hermes agent on an Raspberry Pi driving OpenCode on an old gaming computer with just enough RAM and VRAM to handle an MoE, churning out something overnight that would quickly exhaust the subscription plans, like a knowledge graph for a large document corpus.

In my experience they work well for some jobs.

I recently built a minimal Dark Software Factory out of an N150 Mini PC. It uses three models; Sonnit, Sol, and Gemma.

But, I have a LOT of instructions about how I prefer the software it builds. Gemma doesn’t handle all my instructions very well. But it’s close!

I’m running gemma-4-12b because I have limited RAM and larger models were too slow.

I do two types of jobs: planning and prototyping. It has done fine at some of my planning rounds.

I still consider it experimental and don’t use it a lot but I think we’re getting there.

There are many enterprise environments where running modern models is... difficult. Rather than fighting security for months, a user could petition for a mac studio and have rough cost parity with a z.ai subscription.

if they are a heavy user, perhaps they string 4x together.

I’d be curious to use them on larger data sets. Log files, for instance. High volume, might be low value per line but not much cost per token if you already have a gpu to interpret them using a LLM.

Data privacy and "unsafe" models are pretty valid reasons to use local models. If I want to generate violent images/text you cannot do that using cloud models.

I was getting semi-useful results from a 128GB M4 Max. That was a few months ago, and the models have improved (quite a bit) since then, but now I'm happy to send my $20/month to get Claude code.

It's still frustrating as hell to come down in the morning, having given it a list of tasks to do overnight, with tests to pass before they're "done" and find that it worked for about 20 minutes after I went to bed, and decided that it would stop at "3am" (it wasn't) and "not do significant work this at this late hour". Like WTF ? You're an LLM. You don't sleep.

Bloody training data full of humans demanding sleep. I tells ya...

Could you elaborate on your experience with local models on your card? I've been thinking of upgrading to 9070 XT, and was thinking the 16GB would be okay-ish to at least run something usable locally, no?

I've been experimenting with local models on an M5 Max MBP w/ 128GB of RAM since March of this year. Generally I've had very good results. Where things were lacking initially was with tool calling and the need to rely on tool calling for functionality like web search, which is otherwise well integrated in the cloud models. There is also a lot more work required on the harness side, however at this point (August 2026) there is not only much better tool calling in local models, but community supported projects have built good harnesses. Pi.dev and OpenCode + a SOTA local model is /very/ /very/ capable these days. Using LM Studio's built-in chat with a decent system prompt and proper tuning with local models is /very/ capable these days. Cloud models are still better, but it's the "harness" (not in the desktop app, but in the backend) that makes it so for the most part.

IMO local models require a substantial amount of prompt+harness engineering to get in the neighborhood of what you'd get from a cloud model. Which isn't a bad thing, you'll learn a whole lot about how these things work.

What you'll learn pretty quickly from said engineering is that there's a lot more to a good LLM than just the weights themselves. You need a good search provider (also self-hostable, but sounds easier than it really is). You need (well, it's debatable) a memory system. You need a good system for up-to-date library references like a Context7 (also self-hostable but the options are surprisingly not that good). You need a good set of specialized subagents that can perform various tasks well -- for the sake of "doing things well" but also managing context efficiently.

When you've got all that, local models can be _extremely_ useful. But there's one other important thing and that's decent hardware, unfortunately. A lot of people try out local models using small consumer GPUs or Macs and are rightfully unimpressed with the performance. And if the performance doesn't get them, usually they have expectations that they'll perform at Claude levels out of the box. Getting in that neighborhood, like I said, definitely requires some work.

I have multiple 48GB friends that successfully run smaller quantized models for general assistance + light editing (coding, spreadsheets, etc), that don't require very heavy models.

So yes, they are genuinely very useful, but they are not yet a full replacement unless you have more powerful hardware and or don't need more intelligent ai.

You're limited by the manufacturer (CUDA is king, thus NVIDIA is the king right now) and your lack of VRAM will make using a useful model difficult.

I'm not surprised at all.

Context: I have a farm of DGX Sparks and several RTX 6000's, and can run very close to foundational models with ~2 sparks

I might be wrong but subscription models don't give you API access. I'm only interested in API access when it comes to personal use, so local models running for free makes sense for me.

That said I have an RTX 5090, not a Mac Mini, so it's not exactly the same level of performance... The latest open models run at 200 tpm at around 30B params.

> 16GB RTX 9070

What's an RTX 9070? Do you mean the RX 9070 or RTX 5070?

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