Do yourself a favor: Set up OpenCode and OpenRouter, and try all the models you want to try there.
Other than the top performers (e.g. GLM 5.1, Kimi K2.5, where required hardware is basically unaffordable for a single person), the open models are more trouble than they're worth IMO, at least for now (in terms of actually Getting Shit Done).
Open models are not bullshit, they work fine for many cases and newer techniques like SSD offload make even 500B+ models accessible for simple uses (NOT real-time agentic coding!) on very limited hardware. Of course if you want the full-featured experience it's going to cost a lot.
People that love open models dramatically overstate how good the benchmaxxed open models are. They are nowhere near Opus.
I love my little hobby aquarium though... It's pretty impressive when Qwen Coder Next and Qwen 3.5 122B can accomplish (in terms of general agentic use and basic coding tasks), considering that the models are freely-available. (Also heard good things about Qwen 3.5 27B, but haven't used it much... yes I am a Qwen fanboi.)
Just because you can't figure out how to use the open models effectively doesn't mean they're bullshit. It just takes more skill and experience to use them :)
Fun fact: AWS offers apple silicon EC2 instances you can spin up to test.
I took the plan that I used from Codex and handed it to opencode with Qwen 3.5 running locally.
It created a library very similar to Codex but took 2x longer.
I haven't tried Qwen 3.6 but I hear it's another improvement. I'm confident with my AI skills that if/when cheap/subsidized models go away, I'll be fine running locally.
Many providers out there host open weights models for cheap, try them out and see what you think before actually investing in hardware to run your own.
The best bang for the buck now is subcribing to token plans from Z.ai (GLM 5.1), MiniMax (MiniMax M2.7) or ALibaba Cloud (Qwen 3.6 Plus)
Running quantized models won't give you results comparable to Opus or GPT.