alt Hacker NewsHow many months do you plan on spending hundreds of dollars a month? You should probably just own your compute. It'll probably cost you less, and you'll have no concern over who has access to your chats.
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A single video card with any amount of ram is in the thousands of dollars, and you'd need a stack of them to replicate what the providers performance.
Running your own compute has a lot of risks too, you have to keep it secure against attacks on the models that you're running. Giving away all your chats to hackers because you don't secure your own stuff isn't really winning either.
$200/mo @ 1 year = $2400 2400 gets me about 1/2 of a 128gb NVIDIA DGX Spark, so i could do a year of nonstop inference of (checks notes) quantized Qwen 3.8-27B, a model i would never choose to use. yay, such savings.
How much does it cost to run your own hardware such that the service is comparable to Claude? Similar speed, similar features, web chat access, CLI access?
I don't know, but I do expect to eventually switch over. That said: the upfront time to setup (and continued fiddling) and cost of a high-end local compute system represent major investments, when I could just... keep being insanely productive with frontier AI in CC. And models/harnesses can themselves be security liabilities (see Mistral, LiteLLM, etc recent supply chain attacks). So I'm personally waiting for the local AI scene to mature, so I can be more precise about how I take the plunge. I will say: if the subscription pricing ever goes away or materially changes for Anthropic, I'm headed straight to order whatever the best local setup is, within my budget.