[Aurornis]

> hedge against the various tail risks of third-party providers raising prices

They could 10X the prices and you’d still be better off. It’s also unlikely that prices go up enough to warrant a $100K local investment to prevent paying a couple bucks per million tokens.

> or denying you service

I guess you’re not familiar with OpenRouter? There are many providers there. There are providers outside of OpenRouter. There will always be someone to take your business.

> or somehow abusing your data...

If data security is your concern then you’re better renting a server as needed still.

If you cannot tolerate any data leaving, then local models are the only way. You pay a high premium for it!

[gizajob]

People seem to miss that with local models you can have them burning their wee digital brains out 24/7, which is a different class of AI usage than that from online models even at a few dollars per million tokens.

[CamperBob2]

There's a definite psychological branch point. With a remote provider, no matter how readily you can afford it, your mindset is always going to be, "I should think twice about what I'm doing. I hate to waste tokens." With your own hardware, your mindset is more like, "I should try to get more done. I hate to see this thing just sitting there idle."