If the newer models require more/better hardware then you’ll lose capabilities.

I think you’re better off renting GPU instances and running all the software on those. It’ll be cheaper than Anthropic and OpenRouter but slightly more expensive than electricity and depreciation of hardware.

The newer models don't require more/better hardware. There's a small army of local llm enthusiasts who are running LLMs using 3090s and H100s because they have lots of memory. Them being old isn't really that big of an issue as the compute power needed is relatively low all things considered.

The number of parameters needed for these open weight models has mostly stabilized so the actual memory requirements aren't likely to change all that much.