The free Claude subscription is an insufficient level of service because what I'm looking for is the ability to send as many queries as my heart desires, and to be able to use it with a coding agent. Therefore, I must spend some kind of money. The cheapest flat price plan I can buy from Claude is $20.
That's why I'm comparing against $20 a month. Of course, maybe for this sparse use case it would be better to use API billing instead of a $20 plan, although maybe that means I'm thinking about billing variability.
I am not comparing it to the level of intelligence that Claude offers. I'm comparing spending $500 one time to spending at least $20/month forever. Yes, it's smarter than the model I'm running, but if I'm not paying that money Claude ends my usage mid-conversation and tells me to come back in 5 hours.
The model I'm currently running is Qwen 3.8 Flash Next using Strata (https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata), the VM has 64GB of system RAM assigned (which was previously sitting unused, with deep apologies to Ram Altman). It's definitely not a bad model, and gets the job done for me.
I would generally agree with you that I'm never going to break even against buying tokens from better open weight models on the open market, or maybe even just buying Sonnet 5.5 tokens, but I'm also gaining the data sovereignty aspect, which is worth a non-zero amount of money.
On top of that, the GPU is an asset with resale value, so I'm not losing the money permanently. It has appreciated in value by $150 since I purchased it, and will probably be worth no less than $200-300 in the next 5 years in the worst case.