alt Hacker NewsCompare to the cost of professional-grade tools in other trades and craft hobbies.
Sure, $4000 can be a lot of if you're a casual hobbyist or are struggle to meet everyday lifestyle costs, but it's definitely not "insane" if this is the trade you make your living from or if you've established a lifestyle that affords disposable income for your hobbies.
And for some people, $4000 for a device you have complete control over and can repurpose and tinker with to your own needs and curiosities is a much much more justifiable expense than a $200/mo rental for some narrow-access tool that somebody else controls.
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Yeah, in any other profession where you need to buy a van to drive stuff around, you easily spend similar amount of money on capital investment.
It's "insane" compared to the $1,500 it should have cost before the RAM crisis
I am pretty confident that given a $200 subscription on any of the big labs, you're getting $4000-$8000 per month in subsidized tokens... do what you wan't with your dough... and I too have a spark that I got really early (October 2025), but no, economically it does not compare to what's runnable locally in terms of quality from the frontier models. Economically, it looks like for as long as there are subscriber plans, you're better off renting.
Before getting the spark, I was just using a google colab account, their $49 dollar plan allows you access to h100's and I can run qwen there in a Jupyter notebook... and if I really need that web front end I can just use cloudeflair/tailscale/the local ssh client to reverse tunnel it.
For $200/mo you either have a SotA model you can’t run on those devices or you have a cheaper model where you pay less than $200 or have a really big amount of tokens without the energy costs and the risk of failing machine
That's only half the reason it's expensive.
The other reason is that it would likely take years to spend $4000 (plus the real cost of electricity) worth of tokens on a 3rd-party provider that's running a similar limited, DS Flash type model. By that time, the hardware will be obsolete, assuming it's still operational.