[ekidd]

You're unlikely to ever be priced out of tokens, at least if you'd be willing to settle for a model closer to Sonnet 4.5. That level of model certainly isn't as efficient as Fable 5, but it can crank out CRUD apps and other consulting mainstays quite well, with some supervision.

To give you an example of model in this class, the DeepSeek V4 Flash preview is a 284B A13B model, with a native quantization mixing 4 bit and 8-bit values. You can easily run it on an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell (or 2) at a reasonable quant, especially if you offload the MoE weights to 48-64GB of system RAM. This costs US$11,800 at Microcenter right now, and it will work in any gaming box with decent cooling and a modern 1000W power supply. Over the lifetime of the card, an entire system would cost you under $4,000/year. Power is about 300W for the card (either a blower model, or a workstation model with the power cap), and another 150W or so for the rest of the server.

Or you could buy it on Open Router from dozens of different commodity vendors, starting around $0.09 per million tokens input, $0.18 per million tokens output. This is a competitive market price, so some of the providers might be losing money or reselling surplus capacity. But given the underlying hardware costs, the numbers are in the ballpark. In other words, if you're willing to settle for lower-quality tokens, you can get roughly Sonnet 4.5 for close to free, or as a modest capital expense for a successful freelancer. Halfway decent tokens are cheap, and you can generate them in-house!

[toasty228]

> You can easily run it on an RTX Pro 6000

Sure, and people can just build their own dropbox for like $250 too.

How many people will bother though

[ekidd]

Well, since you "freelance using GPT" and you expressed concern that you'd stop being able to make a profit if you had to pay API prices, I figured that swapping an off-the-shelf graphics card into a gaming rig might be a reasonable way to stay in the black. If it came to that. And the software setup on Linux is just compiling and installing llama-server, which shouldn't be enough to stop any programmer trying to make a living.

Or you could just take your credit card and spend $20 on credits at https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash. I'm not sure that I could manage to spend even a $1/day at those rates.

My larger point is that while frontier tokens are a near-monopoly and who knows what they really cost, many real-world workflows can be run using commodity tokens, or even served in-house by anyone who can afford to hire US or EU programmers. And if you're willing to settle for what would have been a state-of-the-art coding model in October 2025, commodity tokens are close to free.

[nsxwolf]

The problem is I cannot imagine ever making a single dollar with AI. I have built about 16 SaaS apps with AI, in the time it took to build by first old fashioned human-created SaaS app. The one thing the agentic coded apps have in common with my old one is that none of them have ever won a single paying customer.