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Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

> $20 gets you nothing beyond what a local model running on your own graphics card can deliver.

I'd guess you're deliberately exaggerating here, but still. I've never clocked the actual tokens/second, but I'm on the $20 plan and get ~15M tokens/month for fully utilized weekly quotas (checked couple months ago). Meanwhile the best I've been able to get locally was ~8 tokens/second with Qwen3.6 35B A3B, which is wildly painful for coding sessions and gets a maximum ~20M tokens in a month... if it's going 24/7.

Just wanted to stick some empirical data here, given that statement.

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I run local models. Your op is absolutely wrong. To get a local LLM is at least a $1500 investment at the cheapest. $5000 if you want usable.

At $1500 that's 75 months of $20/mo Claude which are MUCH better models than you can run locally.

At $1500 that's 75 months of $20/mo Claude which are MUCH better models than you can run locally.

The point raised by this very article is that you can't depend on that. It's Flowers for Algernon As A Service.

This calc is off. Using Claude for a few hours with the $20 plan will hit the limit for a week while the local model can process things 24/7.

Running 24/7 doesn't make sense though, unless you're providing a service to others. But if it's just you then there has to be time taken to review+test what's being done and craft new prompts. And if that local hardware isn't decent enough it's impractical for anything serious that's interactive. Meanwhile I just take the Claude limits on stride and break, or if a week is pretty heavy then I augment with DeepSeek Flash via OpenRouter (does wonders in a single turn when I have Claude prompt it to handle implementation slices).

If you already have that $1500 or $5000 setup though..

Ouch. I get ~45t/s with Qwen3.6 35B A3B, and around ~70-80 with my current model Ornith 1.5 35B A3B. Local models work a treat IMO if you've got decent hardware for it.

They’re very nice for some things.

One challenge I run into is I run many agents at once, so local resource are a tiny fraction of the total inference we’re using. Every developer with his own Pro 20x, Max, etc. accounts is letting us hit literally trillions of tokens a month.

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