"Standard" doesn't imply "good", but that doesn't mean "non-standard" is better. Cost-per-quantity (L/100km) is easier to compare than quantity-per-cost (MPG) because how much you use isn't going to change based on the model. Which is to say, if two local models are both $0.00 per million tokens, they effectively have the same cost. You could argue that you might get better results by throwing out more tokens, but the solution is to add more significant digits to the price per unit.