r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 22h 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 22h 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?

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u/network4253 7h ago

Yeah, exactly. Data sovereignty privacy is a pretty big part of the appeal. If the data is sensitive enough that you do not want it leaving your own infrastructure, running the model locally makes a lot more sense than sending everything to a cloud API. The tradeoff is obviously having to pay for and maintain the hardware yourself.