Two thoughts.

A $20/month Gemini subscription is truly all you need, then yeah, sure.... obviously a homelab setup is a ridiculous alternative on a pure cost basis. For most people doing "real" work with LLMs 40+ hours per week, a more apt comparison would be one or multiple $200/month subscriptions. At which point the break-even point of a homelab is much sooner.

However, most people running homelabs are doing it for other reasons. Independence, learning, and/or privacy issues.

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gessha a day ago | parent [-]

I love this quote from a homelab reddit:

- Is that even worth the electricity price compared to api? - We don't ask that here

	▲	booty 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hahaha. It's an excellent question, though! I have not spun up my own homelab, but, I have researched it and the electricity costs can be mitigated to a large extent. One... the GPUs can be massively clocked down during idle state, to the point where the fans can be shut off as well. The machines themselves can be shut down and wait for a magic wake-on-LAN packet if needed. Two... even under load, the GPU cores can be significantly underclocked with very little performance loss. The GPU and VRAM/HBM clocks are independent, and the GPU is largely bottlenecked on VRAM/HBM so you can just drop the GPU speed. A commonly reported figure I saw was, basically, 350W nominal cards being underclocked to consume "only" 200W under load with ~5-10% perf loss. This all assumes you're using discrete GPUs and not AIO systems like a Mac Studio which is going to be pretty efficient just by design; they idle at 35W or so and in practice max out at a few hundred watts. I believe DGX Spark and Strix Halo are similar. I must stress that this is second-hand anecdata here, admittedly, but my understanding is that it can be pretty manageable.