If you compare to a smarter US model like Grok 4.3, $1400 will pay for 560M output tokens, which at ~25 t/s locally using it nonstop for 8 hours a day would take two years to pay back. Not accounting for bubble prices or electricity.
According to openrouter, Opus 4.8 is 128 t/s. So 10x faster than my antirez/ds4.