You still have electricity and capital investment. Envelope math suggests cheap electricity is costing you something like $0.50/mtok and the opportunity cost on the capital tied up and lost in the unit purchase and resale is going to cost you something like $2/mtok at 100% utilization (so, frontier model prices or higher at real utilization), and you don't benefit from any elasticity.
Hosted GLM 5.3 flash is like $0.15/mtok in $0.50/mtok out
Time to completion also must be considered. If I have to wait around for hours for a prompt to complete locally and I’ll need to iterate quickly, I’m better off hosted than local. If it’s “free” and slow it may just not be worth it.
Hosted GLM 5.3 flash is like $0.15/mtok in $0.50/mtok out