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

sunkcost.ai

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

#91

Post by v3ss0n »

ChickeNES wrote: post #66
v3ss0n wrote: post #55

Besides from privacy: I already making twice now.you own the hardware and the price had doubled since i bought. Almost tripled. You missed the opportunity and i have 4 of those awesome machines. Cry on. I sell those to business who need local air gapped requirments and I make a lot more money! I can run the alliterated models where none of the service prvoider even dare to provide. THose benefits outweights a few K.…

> And show me an api provider that allows me to run 10x agents concurrently for 5 days straights . Any of them on a Max/Pro plan as long as you are smart about model selection? That's my main objection to local inference, I'd need a whole rack of GPUs to do as many things in parallel that I can do for $400 a month. I do plan on setting up some local inference hardware, but...RAM and GPU prices alone are $$$$

> I'd need a whole rack of GPUs

no , all you need is one small DGXSPark with proper setup.

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

#93

Post by binary132 »

The real question should be why anyone would voluntarily continue to spend money on a software service that costs as much as an expensive computer when they could just buy an (upgradeable) expensive computer and use it as much as they want, approximately forever.

Imagine owning nothing and being happy.

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

#94

Post by JKCalhoun »

txrx0000 wrote: post #8

It 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…

Agree. As the meme/old-ad goes, "Running it on my own machine? Priceless!"

Some of us get a weird thrill that we can actually do this. Mind-boggling time we live in.

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

#95

Post by v3ss0n »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #85
v3ss0n wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Bot? Care to explain any difference vs DSH / OpenCode / Hermes ?

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #12

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.

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by no-name-here »

dwb wrote: post #90
no-name-here wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>> Claude Code is $100+ or else be constantly throttled

>> 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

But the GP commenter specifically compared the cost of solutions such as Claude Code against a 32 GB model.

If they are going to compare cost, they should compare to the cost of a hosted ~32 GB model.

Or if privacy trumps everything for them, then just say that and don't bother comparing costs of incredibly disparate solutions, as Claude Code costing $100+ a month was a red herring if they're happy with 32 GB model output - they could have compared to a far cheaper option that matched their local model's quality.

It would be like someone saying they were able to buy a bike to get to work, saving them $x million compared to buying a Bugatti. When really, if they're going to compare cost they should compare to a cheap car, or not bring up the cost of an expensive car at all if exercise trumps everything else for them.

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