I've moved completely to local models that I run with my M1 Mac Studio (64gb ram) some time ago. But for the rare times when I feel the local, quantized Qwen3.6 isn't enough, I just connect to Openrouter and use something like Kimi, GLM or Deepseek for a fraction of the price of Anthropic et al.
I currently don't see a world where it makes sense to run a local model that will eats up 60% of my RAM, 20-30% of my disk space while providing worse quality output than a $20/month subscription.
For me, those things are nice benefits but not the motivation. It's just a desire to own my tools and remove the magic wherever possible, and not pay a big corporation who is constantly tweaking/changing things that I might not like. It's the same reason I migrated everything I host off of Azure and onto a VPS, and why I moved from Jetbrains Rider to Neovim, and so on.
https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-OptiQ-4...