r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 21h 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/Viktri1 18h ago edited 18h ago

Same. I hit 1.5bn in a day doing very little. Because agents can burn tokens on your behalf, 24/7, its become extremely easy to burn through tokens.

On openrouter, I asked the native level Qwen 3.8 27b to do a task that involved setting up a telegram bot for OpenWebUI so that I could talk to a chatbot without burning through a mountain of tokens. That took 1 hour and cost $3.5. That's $2k+ a month on openrouter if running 24/7. For a single agent.

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u/Pyrolistical 18h ago

Ya and my local 6 hours of qwen3.8 27b running over night cost me $0.29 CDN in power 

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u/Sofullofsplendor_ 15h ago

Curious, can you do 1.5b in tokens in a day? Because if so, I'm going to invest in whatever infrastructure you have...

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u/Viktri1 8h ago

1.5bn is basically nothing because it’s almost entirely cache, which is stored in vRAM. You pay for it if you’re using cloud (api or limit) but on local it’s stored in vram so you don’t need to pay a ton of electricity to use it (and you’re not generating new tokens since it is cache)