[clickety_clack]

I think it would be very hard to convince someone to pay $100/mo to go back to Claude if they have a local model up and running, particularly now that model improvement has basically been stalled for the last 6 months. It’s so easy to set it up for yourself now too with things like LM studio. That said, there will always be unsophisticated users who can’t figure it out, so there will always be someone there to pay.

[MostlyStable]

The person I was replying to specifically said that the Claude will "encode more knowledge" and that their problem was that they didn't like talking to Claude. It sounds like they think that Claude is at least slightly more functional. And the "not liking talking to it" is probably fixable. Someone for whom a local model works, and for whom the economics make sense, should absolutely run a local model and I wouldn't try to convince them otherwise. I'm sure it's the right choice for a lot of people. But not liking the personality of Claude is probably not a great reason on its own, given the minuscule amount of effort it takes to fix.

[Scoundreller]

The third category are the occasional users that won’t have the hardware and won’t stomach a monthly fee for “unlimited” but are happy to pay-per-use.

I’d think the volume for that category would be low but LLMs aren’t just for coding.

[dghlsakjg]

I’m probably the third category. I like experimenting and trying different models and techniques. I want api access for my own apps and Claude subscriptions don’t have that.

Sure I could splash out a ton of money for a high ram Mac, but deepseek is so dirt cheap that I think depreciation on a high end machine costs more than my api spend.

Example of what I’m using it for: building a semantic database of podcast content (podcast discoverability sucks on an episode level). I need a cheap LLM, an embedder, a transcriber, none of which Claude will do.

My api costs for coding agents plus running apps are about ~$20/month, but I get more than just chat + Claude code.

If all I was doing was pumping an employers codebase through a coding agent, Claude would be the answer.

[chrisweekly]

Not everyone has the right hardware.

[clickety_clack]

I guess I’m thinking of the $100/mo users, for whom it’s probably possible to get the right hardware.