I like this calculator but it’s really wrong at least for dgx spark. I have one and I get 4x the tokens/s .
Aw very interesting! This is great feedback - what model are you running? I'm keen to do more crowdsourced data as time goes on.
Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
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Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#22I have a home server running vibed applications. VPS host would cost $25/mo or $300/yr. Mac mini can also build iOS applications. I think if you’re a mobile dev, you can have concurrent builds for your agents instead of everyone waiting on a single machine to finish.
What models are you running on it? I'm also an iOS dev but I find I need more frontier models to get good quality code from it.
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#23[dead]
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#24It pays off instantly , because OpenAI/Anthropic can no longer see what I'm doing and that's worth a lot of money to me. If I am offloading some of my thought processes to a machine, I want to own that machine. And if I finetune the model, I can gain access to parts of thought space that are cordoned off by OpenAI/Anthropic/Alibaba/whomever due to their "alignment" efforts (i.e. alignment to the AI company rather tha…
I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret. Claude knows about my interior decorating, questions about light bulbs, curiosity about what the Galactic Empire was even trying to do, unpacking SCOTUS decisions, shoe trees, Fed inflation history, etc.
What part of my brain is contained here? Sure, the conversations have back and forth (some have dozens of exchanges), but, like, that's not the secret to me. I don't think it can replicate me, and even if it could… okay?
Are you worried they're going to target ads? That the government will steal something? What?
Claude Code has information about my home server, but google or DDG would also have the broad strokes (torrents). I don't know. Maybe others are working on more sensitive things at home.
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#25I wish you could put different setups on here. I have a couple of A6000s on an AM5.
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#26Yeah no it does not pay for itself just comparing to cloud. Not at these prices at least, people far richer than you or I buy these things wholesale, no scalper, bought a significant amount at cheaper prices, and are wired up the ass with VC money. The premium is not having your million dollar prize and career stolen by billionaires.
haha 100%. We used to just rent our homes. Now we have to rent our intelligence
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#27It pays off instantly , because OpenAI/Anthropic can no longer see what I'm doing and that's worth a lot of money to me. If I am offloading some of my thought processes to a machine, I want to own that machine. And if I finetune the model, I can gain access to parts of thought space that are cordoned off by OpenAI/Anthropic/Alibaba/whomever due to their "alignment" efforts (i.e. alignment to the AI company rather tha…
I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret. Claude knows about my interior decorating, questions about light bulbs, curiosity about what the Galactic Empire was even trying to do, unpacking SCOTUS decisions, shoe trees, Fed inflation history, etc. What part of my brain is contained here? Sure, the conversations have back and forth (some have dozens of exchanges), but, like, that's not the secret…
Tristan Buckmaster found out the hard way.
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#28It pays off instantly , because OpenAI/Anthropic can no longer see what I'm doing and that's worth a lot of money to me. If I am offloading some of my thought processes to a machine, I want to own that machine. And if I finetune the model, I can gain access to parts of thought space that are cordoned off by OpenAI/Anthropic/Alibaba/whomever due to their "alignment" efforts (i.e. alignment to the AI company rather tha…
This was my thought as well. I have a local model monitoring my finances and personal wiki - things I wouldn't want Claude to touch - and the Qwen 3.5 9b handles it all just perfectly.
I also needed a new device anyway - and having this much system memory to run virtual machines has been amazing.
Am paying subscriptions as well tho lol.
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't run recent openAI/Anthropic models locally anyway, so wouldn't a better comparison be a different provider running Qwen or similar model? As then you can also compare against the exact model you'd have locally and any different data privacy of that particular provider ?
Technically true, but the delay between local and closed frontier is only a few months. And individual sovereignty / digital bodily integrity is almost priceless.
Local frontier costs a half million dollars to run locally in anything higher than basically ternary.
Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
#30The idea that you need a new machine is pretty ridiculous. I bought a used HP Omen with a 3090 last month for $2k. 57t/s with Qwen 3.8.
I've not heard of others running HP with it. Hows much RAM do you have?