alt Hacker NewsCompare it to deepseek flash or glm. Those are far more capable and far cheaper. Or compare it to a hosted version of the same model. The math becomes much harder to justify when you compare apples to apples.
If all you do is generate tokens all day, sure, host your own infra. For people that aren’t maxing out hardware, using someone else’s is a pretty economical option. $20 with deepseek flash gets you a LOT of agentic use, and as the frontier moves forward with new models, so do I.
GLM5.3 costs $1.40/M on openrouter. 5.2M tokens per day is $7.28/day, which makes break-even take 83 days.
But let's compare apples to almost-apples! Qwen3.8 flash next is $0.47/M on openrouter, so $2.44 per day, so 246 days to break even. I say almost-apples because on this $600 system we're running an IQ3_S quantization. The hosted model is running... nobody knows what quant. It probably varies bases on the time of day.