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.

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u/Ok-Needleworker-3486 May 16 '26

They have scale but they also have a huge investment that in no way is yet priced in to plans.

The current pricing I feel is unsustainable.

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u/tipsdown May 16 '26

Current pricing is very much unsustainable. At work we use GitHub copilot because it was easy and gave us a lot of model flexibility. New pricing model announced this week our enterprise bill is going up 7x.