I appreciate the author's modesty but the flip-flopping was a little confusing. If I'm not mistaken, the conclusion is that by "self-hosting" you save money in all cases, but you cripple performance in scenarios where you need to squeeze out the kind of quality that requires hardware that's impractical to cobble together at home or within a laptop.

I am still toying with the notion of assembling an LLM tower with a few old GPUs but I don't use LLMs enough at the moment to justify it.