> I pay ~3$ per 1M/tokens for that model on Openrouter

I think the thing is, there's an unspoken "for now" at the end of that sentence and people running this locally are hedging against that "for now". Some people prefer to feel that they own the means rather than rent the means, even if the one they own is worse than the one they can rent. Especially with today's Fable news and the harsh realisation that the "for now" is dependent on very many unpredictable factors, where the one you have locally costs you capital today and a relatively predictable run-rate (made more predictable with on-prem solar for example), but should otherwise work predictably forever.

I'm not saying that you're wrong to do what you're doing, just that many people have their own lines in the sand where renting vs buying makes sense, and it doesn't only boil down to a rational (or irrational) financial decision.

An R9700 is $1350 and can get 100 TPS running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Q5 with 130k context window (with room to spare) with a bit of fine tuning llamacpp-vulkan, but llamacpp's repository instability and lack of real versioning frustrates me.

In terms of electricity, if you aren't using it, even with all the vram loaded, at most your wasting about 30 watts or so.

Prompt processing a large uncached context is annoying, which is why I forced a lower context window, but I don't know if it's any worse in performance than the cloud models I've used.

There's a niceness, to me, knowing I don't have to rent it anymore. If you rent it, the terms can change regularly.

I've spent the past week trying to scheme a way to get affordable local inference of something useful (Qwen3.6-36B-A3B) for ~$500 and have come to the conclusion that it simply isn't viable. A pair of power-restricted P100s in a workstation gets close but the workstations themselves are expensive and rare as hen's teeth (not to mention loud and large). I think early '27 will be when things open up as the hardware market unclenches and further strides are made in small capable models.

I think it's important to be able to do both so you can stay in control of the price to value created relationship.

In last year, some people were publishing aider /ollama/open router [1] and now thankfully people are publishing all around about pi/qwen/llama.cpp/openrouter. It's widespread.

[1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/aider-with-open-router.html

I use local models to explore, hosted models to refine. I somewhat envy those who can sustain local models (q8 120b+) running as a hobby.... for me, the practical path is a better SearXNG setup and knowing my routes forward.

> not to mention the electricity to run them...

And noise.

When they declare open models a 'security risk', his setup will be running, yours will not and even that 3090 will be way outside of your reach.

It’s a personal hobby project why should we care this is how someone chooses to spend their free time and money? Lots of hobbies are expensive and pointless if you think of commercially available offerings. That’s why it’s a hobby and not a small business

You are paying with your privacy ...

Yeah but they can also be used to play games and do other stuff.

Rtx 3090 24 gb set me back 390€ a year ago ( 2nd hand)

Openrouter doesn't give you access to the models internals, i.e. complete control of logprobs, sampler stack, any PeFTs.

Openrouter fking sucks and I don't know why people here act like it's so great. Stop using it if you care about local AI and accept that the cost you'll pay for tokens is higher than you will when consumed via any cloud. That's the price for privacy, control, and better quality via inference time optimizations that otherwise aren't available.

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