$80/MONTH ON CLAUDE API BREAKS EVEN ON A $700 GPU IN 7 MONTHS
a used RTX 3090 handles most day-to-day coding tasks — no need for anything exotic.
$700 upfront. $80/month you were already paying disappears.
7 months to break even. after that, years of inference for free.
the catch most people skip: local models still lag 10-20% behind GPT-4o and Claude on the hardest reasoning tasks.
so the real setup isn't "replace the API." it's:
→ local model for daily coding, quick iterations, routine tasks
→ cloud API kept only for the 10% that actually needs frontier quality
most people run 100% of their workload through the expensive model because it's already set up, not because every task needs it.
check what's actually eating your API bill this month.