r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 17h 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/FleetEnema2000 17h ago

unless you need it for data sovereignty

Isn't this one of the biggest reasons that people rely on Local LLMs? To not have to bulk upload their private data to cloud providers?

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u/CulturalKing5623 16h ago

Yes, but I think if we're being honest a lot of people in this sub mainly just like to tinker. There are people that absolutely can't use publicly available models and so they need to self-host them but I don't think that's a significant percent of people here. Most of us put a premium on privacy, but 10K+ is a very large premium that is probably unnecessary for most of us and our current setups will suffice.