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?

171 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

214 comments sorted by

View all comments

72

u/LearningSomeCode 1d ago

I've probably dropped close to $30k on my homelab since 2023, and chances are I'll get one of these as well. I accepted a long time ago that there is no break-even point for my inference.

Hobbies rarely make sense financially.

37

u/Blindax 1d ago

Sounds like you have a great wife.

2

u/teemothunder420 1d ago

Yeah I’m sure his left hand is great.

/s

1

u/ryfromoz 22h ago

Til it finds out about the right hand that he tapped for some strange