Or more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.
If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.
???
30 Day SEC Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.61%
12m Trailing Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.74%
https://www.ishares.com/us/products/314116/ishares-0-3-month...
1.39% might not seem like a lot, but that's off by more than a quarter.
Our assumptions may differ - and that’s ok... The monthly costs may go down too.
For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions.
25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?)
At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference. For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose
If the pace of hardware change is what the jensens of the world say, then the rents on existing hardware will decline.
If you can settle for a M5 Max base model that would be a $49/month lease.
Today, you should be able to run Qwen 3.8 - 27B amazingly well on either which is giving comparable performance to 5.6 Luna on SWE Bench. The local models are now getting better and more efficient and this should give you headroom. Tools like turbo fieldfare are really reducing the memory requirements to run large models and I don’t see it stopping soon.
Unless you need privacy for your inference this instant, paying for credits can get 80 to 90 percent of people everything they need.
Of course if you do need that privacy, then forking the $25K over to Apple is a no brainer.
There are both cheaper and faster options out there.
That means for context under ~5k or so ttft (time to first token) it's going to respond faster than Claude. If the answer is less than ~1k I think the request finishes sooner. And it's ~claude 4.5 or 4.6 level intelligence.
I've had it work for more than a day on a pi.dev "loop engineering" project involving writing software.
Plus privacy. Plus offline.