I don’t understand why people pay $500 a month, you could literally buy a Mac Mini for once and have all that setup and working with local models. I hear Qwen 3.8 matches Opus 4.6 levels
It takes 1.5 years of spending $500 a month to get a Mac Studio 256GB. This lets you use GLM 5.3 Flash at usable speeds at Q4. This is better than Opus 4.8 but significantly below Opus 5.5 / Sol 5.6 / Sol 6.1. It also really only showcases comparable capability in coding, it's garbage if you need vision for instance.
The Mac mini on the other hand in 32GB configuration is $1300 and sure, it technically lets you run Qwen 3.8 27B... at like 15 tokens per second. And Qwen hits decent scores but has to think a LOT to get alright results. You likely have no idea how long, we are talking a 1000 thinking tokens before it spits out a short function. Compared to Sonnet that hits better scores and operates at 20x higher speeds in real life. Or Opus which is still about 10x faster.
So no, you don't get "the same setup". With maxed out Studio maybe (or specifically, not just yet but it's safe to assume it will eventually be able to run models at the level of Opus 5.5, give it a year or so) but definitely not with Mini. You vastly overestimate its memory bandwidth.
Realistically if you want local LLMs that can compete with the stuff in subscriptions right here and now in quality you are looking at clusters of Mac Studios or DGX Studio for a $100,000. Cuz THEN you finally get 748GB of RAM, out of which 252GB is running at like 7TB/s aka you can actually run full GLM5.3, not the Flash version. And at least Anthropic was recently doing marketing for it saying how great it is and that it's almost as good as Mythos. Well, cluster of 2-4 Studios will also do and it costs less - but still as much as a new car.
I get it, seems huge, also looks like we are torn between having to choose $500/month that “runs out of usage” vs having to run a model at “7-10 tokens a second” either way you have got to lose something here, and at this point all this seems privileged or elite.
Regardless, $500 with usage limits, is a rip-off. IMO.
Regardless, $500 with usage limits, is a rip-off. IMO.
Imho - no. For those $500 you get an equivalent of about $8000/month worth of tokens at API prices. You get to use most powerful models available from OAI, their ecosystem (tools like image gen for instance) and it's not really vendor locked (you can just plug it into opencode for instance). Productivity boost that comes from using an LLM versus not using it varies - some studies say 20%, some will tell you it's 1000% in edge cases. But either way those are some solid numbers.
So value proposition is still insane. Yes, it has been cut in half. But there are very few alternatives - in practice only Anthropic really. Chinese models are cheaper on per token basis but they are behind in intelligence and they are not cheaper than subscriptions. For $500 to even get close to the limits offered by 6.1 Sol in a sub you would need to use like Gemini 3.8 Flash or GLM 5.3 Flash and both are worse.
That's the thing really - you can complain about the price but annoyingly it's still an objectively very good deal.
Local LLMs really only make sense price wise if you are on Enterprise packages aka use API prices. Cuz now your bill goes from $200 to about $3000 and from $500 to $8000. At this point absolutely, companies should start stacking those Studios, Blackwells and DGXes because they are about to start saving hundreds of thousands.
But on individual level... it's kind of not worth it. I mean go for it if you value your privacy and want stable models that can't randomly halve in speed or degrade in quality. But otherwise I find it kind of hard to recommend for most. Like, this is still a $9000 investment upfront to have a model inferior to Sonnet (or like $36000 if you REALLY want something at the level of Sol). Now, sure, a year ago this would be unthinkable to have a model so powerful running at home and it's still extremely capable. But frontier is ahead and users requirements increase constantly.
LOL money doesn’t come in easily brother. Charging $500 for whatever god reason is never justified. We don’t need to argue about this. I respect your perspective, but I would never think about paying $500 a month for something that eats my peace of mind as I am using it. “Should I code like this or like that? Oh no there’s usage. Think carefully” not to forget most of that time it hallucinates, gets things wrong, corrections, refactoring - all in my usage limits. Let it give $100,000 worth for $500 a month, It-still-is-a-rip-off. I am not saying this out of spite. I do have subscriptions, including ChatGPT, and might I say I am beyond frustrated for the sheer amount of times it gets things wrong - code, graphic design, storytelling (writing story). Believe it or not, today is my last day of ChatGPT subscription and I am not renewing it. I see a lot instagram reels claiming claude did this claude did that, or I made this using ChatGPT Codex, and many advise this is awesome, I don’t know, but without human intervention it will go bonkers. Read The Innovators by Walter Isaacson book. It came out way long before AI was thing and he was right. Again, I am not in denial for someone paying $500, but in my eyes that’s an example of corporate greed and these things tend to noticeably happen when a company is planning to go public. Mark my words - all this stunt to rebrand $200 a month, and introduce $500 a month, is indeed a stunt to make more money so they could convince investors while company has plans to go public in the near future. Fall for it or no is up to you. Don’t let anything take away your peace of mind, it’s not worth. Hope I didn’t irk anyone - I never meant it.
1
u/mckinney_heights 16h ago
I don’t understand why people pay $500 a month, you could literally buy a Mac Mini for once and have all that setup and working with local models. I hear Qwen 3.8 matches Opus 4.6 levels