[bob1029]

I've got a machine in a corner collecting dust that cost me $12k to build 2 years ago. It runs fine but it's wildly impractical to use as a daily driver (loud/hot). I keep it as a reminder to not do this again.

At my current pace it would take me until sometime late 2030 to spend the same amount in gpt5.5 tokens.

[anonzzzies]

You forget that, especially on HN, many people are scaremongering that prices will soon skyrocket. Then it will be another story... I easily run $4k+/mo on my claude sub; if I would have to pay that, I definitely would spend 12k on hardware instead and accept a dumber helper.

[jonfw]

You are not stuck between public API pricing for frontier models via Claude and self hosted.

Remember that there are other LLM providers, open models, and previous gen models, that are way cheaper that frontier Claude and still way better than what can realistically run locally