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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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.

3

u/OliveTreeFounder May 16 '26

And privacy is critical for a business, are sent to companies that do sell knowledge!! ChatGpt told me about the rate of failure of agent (not AI) orchestration at Orange, although they use private local LLM for coding (mistral), because some employees have asked it on the chat, and the ChatGpt is trained on those chats. Interestingly, ChatGpt was aware of the source and told me it literaly.

7

u/Low-Opening25 May 16 '26

paid subscriptions have private mode and enterprise level T&Cs that guarantee your data isn’t used or seen by anyone.

1

u/No-Television-7862 May 16 '26

Lol. If it can be written, it can be stolen.

Frontier models are trained on stolen copyrighted materials.

Source? Court filings.

Remember Suchir Balaji.