Local did not pay off: the electricity bill outweighed a cheap cloud subscription

This person argues that local simply was not worth it for their case. Electricity costs about 28 cents per kWh where they live, and their hardware consumed around 5kWh per day, roughly $1.50 at that rate. Within about five days of running they would reach the monthly price of a capable cloud subscription, and cheaper options like DeepSeek 4.1 undercut that further.

The decisive factor is that all their code is public on GitHub, so source privacy provides no benefit. Their conclusion is that they can run a model several times better online for a third of the cost, and they are explicit that this is their own use case rather than a general claim.

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