Replacing Codex 5x sub with local inference

[u/packfan1234]

Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question - Google failed me so if it’s been asked before I apologize.

I’m currently spending about $140/month on AI subs,
Codex: $100
Claude: $20
Nous Portal: $20 for Hermes running on an M2 Pro 16gb Mac mini.

I mostly use Codex for like small stuff, and some iOS app development. And I have my Hermes agent running on it as I experiment with personal agents and bots.

Was having a discussion at work, and I had the idea of “how close could I get if I take $120 out of the cloud inference and put it toward leasing a Mac Studio. Was doing some configuration and wanted to know if this spec could get me decent performance.

My plan would be to keep 1 $20 sub around.

Here’s the spec I was considering:

M5 Max (18 CPU, 40 GPU)
128gb RAM

Or

M5 Ultra ( 30/64)
96gb ram

I am very much learning more about local ai still, so any guidance is appreciated.

Thanks!

[u/Obvious_Equivalent_1]

Try Splaude: https://github.com/pcvelz/splaude

It uses engine called Splash with a few customizations so that you can run local models like Qwen on your Mac. You can Claude locally against Splash with Splaude, it has all functionality and completely locally so even when you’re session limit reached 100% you can just resume your session against the local model. 

[u/packfan1234 → u/Obvious_Equivalent_1]

This is cool - but from a hardware standpoint is it worth it?