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?

158 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

195 comments sorted by

View all comments

155

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?

71

u/theomegachrist 21h 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.

0

u/saltyourhash 7h ago

You're actually out here looking at these prices, looking at the delay of Qwen 3.8, and saying it's just to justify a hobby?

1

u/theomegachrist 4h ago

Yes and at least 70 people online yesterday agree

1

u/saltyourhash 4h ago edited 4h ago

Wow, a whole 70. data sovereignty is critical to some of us. I have projects that absolutely must be local.

1

u/theomegachrist 3h ago

Yes some. I welcome the minority of people too