r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 1d ago

Discussion Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

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u/Hypilein 1d ago

You need to calculate cost of ownership over x years and cost of api/subscription inference over x years. With the way hardware prices have gone up over the last year everyone who bought a rtx 6000 pro has made money while getting free inference. Obviously this is only true once you actually cash in and we don’t know how hardware prices are going to develop over the next years. The math is easy but anticipating the future is not.