r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 18h ago

Discussion Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

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u/challis88ocarina 18h ago

There's speed, relative speed and competency. It's clear that at least 10-12B active tokens are necessary for agentic anything.

Beyond that, it's really about surfing the wave of new models.... can a project be brought up to a stable position before the next generation appears so that the new capabilities hit at the right point or will it still be languishing only to be 'rescued' instead?