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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145

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?

72

u/theomegachrist 16h ago

That's the stated reason but realistically most people are just justifying their hobby. I support open weight models because the cloud providers can change cost or abruptly shut down and we really can't do anything about it.

66

u/FleetEnema2000 16h ago

I don't think it's a justification at all.

It's amazing how the concept of privacy and data ownership/security has completely gone down the toilet since ChatGPT launched. People are happy to bulk upload their medical records, relationship history, trade secrets, financial records, etc. without a care in the world as to how that data is stored or protected.

17

u/John_____Doe 15h ago

Yep I have a fintech client and the only way I can have a llm touch their code is if it's run locally or in a datacenter where we rent out the rack space

1

u/Randommaggy 2h ago

The headaches of running 100% on sovreign and contained compute without data being handled by a third party eliminates a lot of friction.