The value prop really depends on what you're doing.

If you're just vibe coding with giant frontier models, yes, the value will be worse. Especially now, where GPU prices have spiked another 20% last month.

For some tasks where owning the setup and full kv cache matters, the payoff calculation is ridiculously in favor of running your own deployment.

For instance for some batch classifications jobs where the prefix cache hit rate will be >95%.

The calculus also changes if you just use AI as a light tool while coding and don't need the giant models; qwen3 27B runs at 80TPS on a 5090 properly deployed.