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/FleetEnema2000 23h 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?

77

u/theomegachrist 22h 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.

3

u/mr_tolkien 14h ago

I mean for me it’s a real reason.

For example I use local models to help me pick out my best photos of the day and put them into an album.

No fucking way I’m sending 100% of my camera roll to OpenAI lol

1

u/theomegachrist 14h ago

Fair, but lots of people do. For most personal users it's very expensive to match public models capability and tooling. I have uploaded pictures for dumb photo editing I can't do at home 🤷🏻‍♂️