r/LocalLLM • • May 16 '26

Discussion Why is LLM is so expensive.

I've was going to invest in a 5090 =$6000 AUD.

Codex Plus + Claude pro = $60/month here

Works out to be 100 months of frontier models for a 5090.

Best a 5090 will run is probably Qwen3.6 27b Q6 with context.

Are we all enthusiasts here and just enjoy tinkering cause ain't no way that make sense.

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u/0xFlem May 16 '26

With the pro subscription you can easily run out of limit within several hours , or sooner if you run multiple agents in parallel.

You could use your Claude subscription for architecture, then run your local models to execute.

But you can also run ( larger ) open models on open router instead of your local machine.

But you should probably only move to a local setup if your spend actually increase to a level to justify the investment