For me, investing in hardware seems to be the way to go.

I learned coding nearly 24 years ago and still learning new stuff all the time. At no point in time I had to rely on a subscription model to learn and do new stuff.

If LLM and agents are the default tools for coding and building software, at least for next few years, it seems like a no-brainer to invest $2000-3000 on hardware, like a Halo Strix PC.

I wondered if there might be a no brainer "free" option on discarded hardware.

I have a GTX1080ti which i think is circa 2018, it's unused, more than paid for itself over the years, owes me nothing at this point so the hardware is free.

It runs Gemma e4b multimodal, qwen 3.5 8b or the qwen 4b embeddings models well enough (40+ t/s for the LLMs).

The machine consumes 350 watts at the wall when under load (3 watts when sleeping, 80w at idle). Electricity costs me £0.035GBP/kwh which is cheap for the UK (load shifting via house battery).

144k output tokens for around 1pence (and takes an hour to do that in theory).

It's only JUST cheaper to use than the far more capable deepseek v4 flash model despite the free hardware and ~10x cheaper than normal electricity.

Yes and no. Hardware does lock you in. Granted, I am happy with my 128gb of shared memory, but I am mildly concerned that it actually is more expensive now than when I bought mine. It does not bode well for the future; not when combined with recent WH admin moves on Anthropic and the reality that next batch of good models may require more than 128gb to run well.

edit: I am not dismissing local. I am one such user ( though I have subs too ), but one has to be clear eyed about the trade-offs.

$3k isn't getting you frontier model capability. It's barely getting you any capability if that's split into buying an entire PC rather than just GPUs.

With you here. I'm using my cheapo 16gig vram card I picked up a year or so ago, and I'm like -- yes, I percieve that you can pay for way more tokens per second that I can do at home.

But that feels like measuring productivity in lines of code. For what I'm doing, I'm not seeing the benefit in any subscription.

Sure, I can't one-prompt a whole new boring CRUD app, but oh well.

3k? Try 10