Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA News
cost-analysis ai-inference local-inference cloud-services hardware-cost model-comparison

Summary

The article compares the cost of running AI models locally on Mac Studio M5 Max hardware versus using cloud services like OpenRouter, suggesting that waiting for smaller models to improve may be more cost-effective.

At $10k, you could get - 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan) - 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter - 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter. Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?
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