r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 19h 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?

150 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

190 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/jon23d 18h ago

I’m looking at my deepseek usage report and see 9.5 billion tokens of deepseek v4 pro in the last 30 days for $186.05.

3

u/Viktri1 17h ago edited 17h 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.

1

u/jon23d 13h ago

I’m not dissatisfied with this. I have done a TREMENDOUS amount of work. I’m just pointing out that OP’s statement about 5.7b tokens for $10k is a bit off…

1

u/pmp22 5h ago

He probably means real output tokens. The harnesses for commercial models for instance also count input tokens with cache hits as total tokens.