Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
Which open models fit your machine, how fast they run, and how many tokens it takes to pay back the hardware against an API. Honest enough to say never.
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I kept hearing "just buy a Mac and run models locally, it pays for itself" and wanted to check. Sunk Cost takes a machine, a model and how many tokens you use a day, and works out how long the hardware takes to pay back against renting the same model by the token.
Obviously there are other reasons to buy your own hardware aside from just saving money on llms but this is just looking at it from a raw cost saving perspective.
If you have any ideas on how I can make this more helpful lmk!
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