My local model never says no. I never get banned. If I want to do security stuff, reverse engine, there it goes! Do I wanna chat about politics? No problem! Do I want it to analyze medical stuff? I don't get to hear that it's not a doctor and I should call 911. Do I want to explore legal docs, no problem! There are lots of things that cloud models will say no to! I read that don't even agree to help with advanced biology and chemistry topic much. I also never run out of tokens, no 5 hr limit. I can run it 24/7. I don't run out of tokens. I can run 16 sub agents at the same time, non stop! 1-4 billion tokens a month? No problem. Any agent harness I want! No restrictions. Privacy all day. My own true system prompt, not something someone has determined, no filters. Furthermore, there are many open weight cloud models that don't have equivalent online. For a while before cloud models got good at math, the best model at math was DeepSeekv2 Math and there was no API. The only way to use it was to run local. All sorts of audio models, image/video models, etc. No multiple subscription needed. Private UI for my family, kids included (I can guard what kids infer). Got a friend that really needs some tokens? I give em access through private VPN. Telling someone that they are paying for decades of Claude for local AI is like telling someone they are paying for decades of public transport when they buy a car. Sure, you are right, but ...

If I want to go out of business that is what I would do. Most of the data I have here could never be shipped to a service provider, I'd be in lawsuits for the next decade or so and die bankrupt.

LLM subscriptions are heavily subsidized. I’d be surprised if Claude 20x costed the same after a decade.

I was thinking the economics of it the same way.. if the AI companies are burning debt and VC money to give me cheaper tokens why not take them for it? I can always rent a GPU server for those personal, private AI needs.. heck even run a decision model to route them to the rented GPU servers either on demand or scheduled for few hours in a day…

It doesn’t have to be black or white…

For my toy projects, adventures, learning exercises, and throwaway MVPs I will prefer the subscription plans… they are cheap for what they offer today.

Keep in mind that the prices of the big AI companies are currently mostly loss makers. Their plan is to get sufficient market saturation and dependency of their clients and if they achieve that, they will hike up the prices quite a bit.

(Of course this all depends on if their plans work out, but if not then the smaller local models will probably play a big role in the failure of their plan)

But what if you become unable to pay for it ? What if:

- they raise the prices 10x

- go bankrupt

- ban you or your country

- decide not to help you with what you want to do for opaque reasons

- you are in jail because the model halucinated something and the company promptly reported you to the police

Better avoid all off these and go local IMHO.

This trope minimizes so many downsides of "frontier" models. When you can't do what you need to with a model it really isn't valuable - which is why subscriptions still exist. As soon as you're forced to pay actual token costs people who keep saying this will likely wish they had invested in something else earlier.

It's also very clear that providers are running variants of models, especially at the SotA levels. I wouldn't be surprised to find out at some point that 1-2 months after release OAI and Anthropic just run "good enough" quants to save themselves on inference (since they're losing money hand over fist). Another upside of local models is that I don't need to worry about model degradation at any given point.

If you compare to API prices the value difference is not as big.

The anthropic sub is likely still subventioned with VC money. So this may not even be available in 2 years.

But yeah, with current sub prices/budget... It's hard to go with anyone else unless you're rich.

Do you take into account the token allowance? For a heavy user this would be the equivalent of many subscriptions and they add up.

If you compare to API prices the value difference is not as big.

The anthropic sub is likely still subventioned with VC money. So this may not even be available in 2 years.

But yeah, with current sub prices/budget... It'd stick with it too

The bet we (self-hosters) are making is that once these companies IPO, they will be forced to do whatever they have to do to make money. i.e. price increases, more throttling of subscription non-usage-based accoutns, etc.

They are subsidizing all of us to the tune of $billions in losses per month. That can't go on for a decade. Probably not even for another 18 months.

I still use all the tokens Claude will give me on the max plan. But I also run deepseek v4 locally for overflow and for... contingencies.

If you know you will pay Claude a few thousand bucks a year a decade adds up too, owning the hardware could just as well end up cheaper because you can sell it or as others have alluded the price to rent could get much worse.