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Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

sunkcost.ai

81–90 of 91 posts

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#81
On a purely monetary basis it probably never will.

You're competing against companies that get tax breaks, locate themselves optimally, and have large economies of scale.

Also, if it did, the hardware would be bought up, raising the price until there was no economic profit again.

If you can find a unique application for it then maybe?

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret. The proof to the Navier-Stokes problem.

I'm pretty sure they were sending a prompt for Claude to _find_ the Navier-Stokes proof, using ideas that have been publicly shared before online, but not necessarily used for the problem.

But are you pretty sure or actually sure?

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#83

This tells me that the max throughput for the models I'm running on my hardware is lower than it actually is. Please allow us to tweak all the variables instead of locking me in to whatever rate you found by searching

Thanks for all the feedback. You can now enter your own measured tok/s for any machine and model.

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#84
post #14

Fun feature: can you show some sort of list of the best combos? Eg shortest payoff time for best capability in various situations.

Good idea, pretty crude but it's up: https://sunkcost.ai/best/ For each usage level, it lists the quickest pay-back in each capability class, with each model on its quickest machine and one click into the calculator to change the assumptions. Short version: at 1M tokens/day the best Sonnet-class option is Qwen3.8 27B on a Mac mini M6, 8.3 years. It only drops under a year if you're running agents at around 20M tokens…

That was fast!

At 7 tokens/s (Mac mini) you max at 600k/day so you couldn’t hit those higher amounts like 4M where it says 2 year payback?

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#85
post #57

Earlier 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 ?

You haven't tried DeekSeek v4 or GLM 5.3 or Qwen 3.8 Next? You are missing out a lot. Try that with Hermes or Opencode or Deekseek Harness , even Qwen 3.8 27b works really well for that kind of that. I just ask it to install windows as a vm on my linux and install vs Community 2019 on it , and then build a legacy vb 2019 project on it. and sleep When i wake up : It installs Qemu , setup a vm , inside vm download and…

Regarding DeepSeek, which I also like very much, have you tried https://reasonix.io ?

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#86

It pays for itself very quickly if you do 24/7 generation. Use an AI agent that orchestrates other agents working on many things at once constantly. If speed is a factor, you'd not buy a Macbook, you'd buy dual RTX 3090s. About the same price, but at least 6x faster than M5 Max. The benefit of constant generation is you can do a lot more research, coding sub-agents, experiments, etc in parallel when you're not "at wo…

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Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#87
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they were sending a prompt for Claude to _find_ the Navier-Stokes proof, using ideas that have been publicly shared before online, but not necessarily used for the problem.

But are you pretty sure or actually sure?

They obviously did not send the proof to Claude.

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#88
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret. When Claude is used in a professional setting, any or all of: Proprietary intellectual property (a.k.a. system code) PII[0] of the employee, customers, or both HIPAA[1] data known to a system Internal communications not meant to be publicized Sensitive data, such as SSH keys and the like Pretty much anything on a machine which uses Anthropic/OpenAI na…

Anthropic will sign BAAs. They are HIPAA compliant (we used them.)

I understand people’s hesitation but the business agreements are different. The business risks of misusing HIPAA data is not only being banned from a massive enterprise market (last I checked, there were about 1.2m jobs related to claims billing and adjudication) and significant legal repercussions.

Other companies like AWS also handle HIPAA data. Are we afraid they’re stealing it? I don’t believe it, nor that Anthropic is training on HIPAA data.

OpenAI… I will never trust them.

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#89

It pays for itself very quickly if you do 24/7 generation. Use an AI agent that orchestrates other agents working on many things at once constantly. If speed is a factor, you'd not buy a Macbook, you'd buy dual RTX 3090s. About the same price, but at least 6x faster than M5 Max. The benefit of constant generation is you can do a lot more research, coding sub-agents, experiments, etc in parallel when you're not "at wo…

Yeah I'm surprised no one pointed this out, if something like persistent agents gets more popular/useful, the local option pays for itself surprisingly quickly.

Re: Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

#90

Claude Code is $100+ or else be constantly throttled. My usage on GHCP was gonna be $300+ a month. I paid $1350 and threw an R9700 in an existing machine. That's a 4 month pay off or so. Plus, I can feed it sensitive data all day and not be worried where it's going.

An R9700 has 32 GB RAM. Is your comparison against a similar size model? Or shouldn't you be comparing it against the cost of a hosted model matching the one you’re using locally?

You should be comparing the value you get. If you get as much value from a local model as a hosted one, the size difference doesn’t matter.
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