[edot]

I am in a similar boat to you, but I can’t make the money math work. Local LLMs obviously have a privacy benefit but DeepSeek V4 Flash (which you’ll struggle to get running on any single Mac - you’d need at least 128gb RAM) is $0.14$/mtok input $0.28/mtok output on the API. You’d have to be just absolutely burning tokens to ever make this make sense.

Mac Studio M4 Max with 128gb at $3,699 (if you can find it) would equate to 10 million tokens a day of mixed input-output for over 5 years to break even. At which point that hardware is outdated compared to the SOTA models that will probably still be cheap on hosted platforms.