alt Hacker NewsIn a workplace environment I don't think "cheaper" is necessarily the thing to optimize for. Subscription models save you a lot of time (and money) by getting things right faster, solving bigger problems, etc. A cheaper model just consumes more human time.
But with a local model with essentially free tokens, I can set it to work on tasks in the background without having to worry about any usage limits. Deferring simple bug fix tickets or other low complexity to an essentially unattended local model works just fine. And if the result occasionally fails review, it still didn't burn paid usage credits.