If privacy is your top priority, then sure spend a few grand on hardware and run everything locally.

Personally, I run a few local models (around 30B params is the ceiling on my hardware at 8k context), and I still keep a $200 ChatGPT subscription cause I'm not spending $5-6k just to run models like K2 or GLM-4.6 (they’re usable, but clearly behind OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini for my workflow)

I was got excited about aescoder-4b (model that specialize in web design only) after its DesignArena benchmarks, but it falls apart on large codebases and is mediocre at Tailwind

That said, I think there’s real potential in small, highly specialized models like 4B model trained only for FastAPI, Tailwind or a single framework. Until that actually exists and works well, I’m sticking with remote services.