> I should be running my own LLM

I approve of this, but in your place I'd wait for hardware to become cheaper when the bubble blows over. I have a i9-10900, and bought an M.2 SSD and 64GB of RAM in july for it, and get useful results with Qwen3-30B-A3B (some 4-bit quant from unsloth running on llama.cpp).

It's much slower than an online service (~5-10 t/s), and lower quality, but it still offers me value for my use cases (many small prototypes and tests).

In the mean time, check out LLM service prices on https://artificialanalysis.ai/ Open source ones are cheap! Lower on the homepage there's a Cost Efficiency section with a Cost vs Intelligence chart.