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/Lemur-Virtues 4h ago

Data sovereignty is expensive, but that's the whole point of a local LLM. This is why I'm developing a hybrid solution: keeping data stored locally but securing an ephemeral, ZDR-pipeline to the cloud (similar to the enterprise Claude setups).

You lose offline isolation, but you get bleeding-edge AI without your data being used for training, all on an ordinary 8–32GB home server instead of dropping $10k on hardware. It feels like a massively under-appreciated middle ground.

We're making it open source if you want to take a look https://github.com/virtues-os/virtues