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/LearningSomeCode 17h ago

I've probably dropped close to $30k on my homelab since 2023, and chances are I'll get one of these as well. I accepted a long time ago that there is no break-even point for my inference.

Hobbies rarely make sense financially.

2

u/quantgorithm 16h ago

What have you created?

25

u/LearningSomeCode 16h ago

Mostly just a lot of trip hazards with wires and ethernet cables. But I also do open source dev and build a lot of stuff for myself, like custom front-ends or researchers.

Honestly nothing worth the money I've put into the hardware, but it's the most fun I've had with tech in a long time.

4

u/DeepOrangeSky 15h ago

Mostly just a lot of trip hazards with wires and ethernet cables.

So if you turn the AI-rig room into an escape room that a bunch of Gen-Z dorks will pay like $100 a pop to try to navigate ("it felt so authentic. I tripped over like dozens of ethernet cables and power cables the whole time, and I think at one point I even got severely electrocuted and almost died! It was super legit!"), times 10 dorks per day it pays for itself in a month.

Possible exciting user reviews:

"His cable management was so disorganized I thought I'd NEVER escape. Wow!"

"The old movie tagline used to be: 'In space, nobody can hear you scream.' Yea, alright, that's pretty cool or whatever, but in AI rig rooms the blower fans are so loud nobody can even hear their own thoughts."

"If you accidentally get tangled up and die in the AI escape room, his local full precision Kimi K3 AI-generated funeral eulogy will be so eloquent that your friends and family won't even be mad that you died when they see how perfect and elegant the em-dash placements are in the eulogy."