The people i know that use local models just end up with both.

The local models don’t really compete with the flagship labs for most tasks

But there are things you may not want to send to them for privacy reasons or tasks where you don’t want to use tokens from your plan with whichever lab. Things like openclaw use a ton of tokens and most of the time the local models are totally fine for it (assuming you find it useful which is a whole different discussion)

The open weights models absolutely compete with flagship labs for most tasks. OpenAI and Anthropic's "cheap tier" models are completely uncompetitive with them for "quality / $" and it's not close. Google is the only one who has remained competitive in the <$5/1M output tier with Flash, and now has an incredibly strong release with Gemma 4.

Unless you have a corporate lock-in/compliance need, there has been no reason to use Haiku or GPT mini/nano/etc over open weights models for a long time now.