alt Hacker NewsA single person could make french fries for themselves cheaper than McDonalds, but once they have to start including the cost of the building and equipment, charging for their labor, and complying with health codes and worker safety requirements, they will quickly find that the fixed costs swamp the variable costs.
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nonethewiser • yesterday at 3:14 PM
>but once they have to start including the cost of the building and equipment, ...
But they don’t have to include any of those costs.
Remember the comparison was running a model at home for yourself. The analogue is making fries at home for yourself. Thats cheaper.
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Here's an anecdote. I have repurposed my 6 year old 32gb M1 MacBook Pro to run Qwen 3.6 35b a3b and I used to give it nightly maintenance tasks that span my OSS github repos.
I gave it mundane tasks like updating dependencies, writing changelogs, etc. It ran about 2 hours a night.
My MBP consumes 0.1w idle and about 10w running inference. I pay $0.33/kwh. If it runs for 2 hours a day over 365 days - it will cost $2.41/year (excluding idle time).
Excluding the cost of hardware - the running costs alone are more expensive than DeepSeek's API and the inference quality is much lower. The economics are even worse on AMD AI Max mini PCs and worse still with a dedicated GPU setup.
That said - my Apple Silicon example is orders of magnitude cheaper than western inference providers and offers unrivaled privacy.
Perhaps a local AI setup would be compelling for small/medium business users... and it would be practical if the hyperscalers didn't buy all of the potatoes on Earth.