Yeah, 20 months of Claude Max until they rugpull you. I’m spending 7-10k/month in raw token costs on Claude Max. Having an alternative is a nice insurance policy.

Just a hunch, but I think the most cost effective “local” deployment method right now is renting GPU clusters by the hour and running all the inference software on them yourself. This will be cheaper than capital expenditure on hardware that will depreciate and become last-gen, and cheaper than OpenRouter pay per token.

> at the rate AI is currently progressing, i think you'd be optimistic to consider that as having a 2 year depreciation.

How so? Model capability at a fixed hardware level has been consistently (and rapidly) increasing. You might or might not be able to run state of the art 2 (or 4 or whatever) years from now but you can reasonably expect the hardware to last upwards of a decade with model performance consistently improving over that time frame.

You can get a tolerable (at least by some metrics) experience using 10 year old hardware today.

You can get a 128GB Strix Halo for under $3k. Used to be under $2k. Even if you believe it'll be completely obsolete for AI in two years, it'll still be good for many other things. Games for at least several more years, a great home server and/or desktop almost indefinitely. Plus, we might actually reach good enough levels for some AI use cases, if we're not already there.

And never underestimate the potential for enshittification. Your local rig will only deliver better performance over time as more and more tweaks come out. With cloud services expect the opposite to happen as subsidies run out. It's entirely possible that they will intersect on a bang per buck basis within two years.

people who can't afford Claude max 200 are using qwen 3.6 27b for local coding assistance already

You forget that after 2 years you still gonna have said Mac Studio that can be sold off for 30-50% of the price.

Of course its gonna lose value faster if something magical happen with hardware manufacturing, but you'll likely get 25% back at least.

On other side you cant really predict how valuable claude max gonna be in a year because Anthropic can further enshittify it.