Hey guys, come fight me: how do you justify local LLMs from a value perspective?

I’m not talking about privacy, censorship, offline use, control, or hobby value. I’m trying to figure out whether it actually makes financial sense to buy a machine that can run local LLMs well, purely for the savings.

### Example comparison

- \~$2,500 128GB Strix Halo box

- \~$3,700 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio

vs. Minimax 2.7 on OpenRouter:

- **Input:** $0.30 / 1M

- **Output:** $1.20 / 1M

- **Cache read:** $0.059 / 1M

Using a rough **3:1 input:output** ratio, I get:

- **3M input + 1M output = $2.10**

- **Effective rate = $0.525 / 1M total tokens**

Amortized over **36 months**, that seems to imply break-even around:

- **132M total tokens/month** on the **$2,500** machine

- **196M total tokens/month** on the **$3,700** machine

That makes it seem like very cheap APIs are hard to beat on pure dollars.

So for those of you running local, what is the economic case?

The biggest possibilities I can think of are:

- enough volume, including shared or concurrent use, to break even on the hardware

- avoiding runaway API bills from badly configured agents or workflows

plz respond