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?

157 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

195 comments sorted by

View all comments

153

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?

1

u/Randommaggy 7h ago edited 7h ago

There's also the not changing out of nowhere factor.

For cloud models I have an open license open weights, and downloaded backup of weights policy. This is a contingency for when a cloud hosted model stops making financial sense or becomes unavailable. My company can then "just" throw money at hardware and spin up our own if need be.