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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

What will be the knock on effect on us consumers?

Self hosting LLMs isn’t completely out of the realm of feasibility. Hardware cost may be 2-3x a hardcore gaming rig but it would be neat to see open source, self hosted, coding helpers. When Linux hit the scenes it put UNIX(ish) power in the hands of anyone with no license fee required. Surely somewhere someone is doing the same with LLM assisted coding.

The only reason to have a local model right now is for privacy and hobby.

The economics are awful and local model performance is pretty lackluster by comparison. Never mind much slower and narrower context length.

$6,000 is 2.5 years of a $200/mo subscription. And in 2.5 years that $6k setup will likely be equivalent to a $1k setup of the time.

We don't even need to compare it to the most expensive subscriptions.

The $20 subscription is far more capable than anything i could build locally for under $10k.

Costs will go up to levels where people will no longer find this stuff as useful/interesting. It’s all fun and games until the subsides end.

See the recent reactions to AWS pricing on Kiro where folks had a big WTF reaction on pricing after, it appears, AWS tried to charge realistic pricing based on what this stuff actually costs.

Isn’t AWS always quite expensive? Look at their margins and the amount of cash it throws off, versus the consumer/retail business which runs a ton more revenue but no profit.

If you’re applying the same pricing structure to Kiro as to all AWS products then, yeah, it’s not particularly hobbyist accessible?

The article is answering a specific question, and has excluded this on purpose. If you have a sunk training cost you still want to know if you can at least operate profitably.

API prices are going up and rate limits are getting more aggressive (see what's going on with cursor and claude code)

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