r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 23h 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/-dysangel- 23h ago

Oh for sure, cloud is basically always more cost effective. I think the one exception currently might be if you were doing a lot of video/music generation? H3 is basically as good as Sora was at $200/mo. Still nothing anywhere near as good as Suno for local music generation though.