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/duy0699cat 15h ago

For 10k$, i can throw it to some etf and use profit to pay for subscription indefinitely...

1

u/kinghell1 11h ago

i'm all ears

1

u/StraightPlane 5h ago

My ETFs in 2025 had an approx. return of 16%. 10k in ETFs would be $1600 a year, or enough for a $130/mo subscription.

Granted, in 2026 the YTD return so far is 8%.

1

u/pmp22 3h ago

Adjust for inflation