The very best open models are maybe 3-12 months behind the frontier and are large enough that you need $10k+ of hardware to run them, and a lot more to run them performantly. ROI here is going to be deeply negative vs just using the same models via API or subscription.

You can run smaller models on much more modest hardware but they aren't yet useful for anything more than trivial coding tasks. Performance also really falls off a cliff the deeper you get into the context window, which is extra painful with thinking models in agentic use cases (lots of tokens generated).

What are the best open models?