It does make me wonder how the hosted stuff is so cheap. For pretty much everything else, hosted/rented is more expensive but offers better convenience and flexibility. But for AI, even if you consider the total lifetime cost and are utilizing it heavily. You never break even by buying.

They're not cheap at all. I did one xhigh Qwen 3.8 27B agentic coding task last week via OpenRouter and it cost me like $10.

99% of the cost was in input tokens, I only used like 100k ish output tokens. It was a one shot task asking the agent to implement proxy injection to Guice. It did a pretty amazing job.

If you were to use hosted LLMs for a lot of agentic coding, a maxed out M5 Ultra Mac Studio would pay for itself in under a year.

It's a time sharing agreement, just like old-school mainframes and such. You're not getting a full machine to yourself, but a few cycles at a time.

There are economies of scale but there’s also a data center bubble (probably) so there might be some selling dollars for fifty cents going on.