At home, I mostly use openrouter.

A few bucks will realistically last you forever. I also bought a DGX Spark at launch. I've learned a ton. but it's not usually my daily driver. I do run overnight tasks on it, like "read this book and write up notes on each chapter..."

In retrospect, given the dirt cheap prices of apis and or renting hardware, buying hardware for inference was likely a mistake (but not enough of a mistake to sell it now).