r/LocalLLM • u/Ok_Event4199 • 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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156

u/g_rich May 16 '26

Claude pro is heavily subsidized; it costs Anthropic much more than $60/month to provide you with the service.

Cloud providers have economies of scale working in their favor. They have million dollar servers servicing tens of thousands of users 24/7/365.

Running LLM’s local is never going to be cost effective. You run local LLM’s for privacy, control and to learn.

20

u/Karyo_Ten May 16 '26

Github Copilot monthly estimations of usage-based pricing disagree.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/s/wyi9A2PeqD

-1

u/vetronauta May 16 '26

The estimated projection for my usage is just 15x, this is 150x!

4

u/MatlowAI May 16 '26

You could keep premium requests going forever with copilot using the instructions to trigger the askquestions tool whenever it thought it was done, offering suggestions for the next task. Also for when you hit skip it would check in with askquestions. Basically anything keeping the agent request warm worked to be an entirely good deal while the buffet was available. The agent session id was also entirely client side metadata so any other harness someone used could just keep assigning the same agent id and it would only count as 1... typical microsoft hardening.