People seem to miss that with local models you can have them burning their wee digital brains out 24/7, which is a different class of AI usage than that from online models even at a few dollars per million tokens.
There's a definite psychological branch point. With a remote provider, no matter how readily you can afford it, your mindset is always going to be, "I should think twice about what I'm doing. I hate to waste tokens." With your own hardware, your mindset is more like, "I should try to get more done. I hate to see this thing just sitting there idle."
