I’m on the 5x Claude Code plan and it’s hard to overstate how good it is for what I pay. Clean context, skills where they make sense, nothing wasteful. My usage stays low and I still have headroom before I’d consider 20x. Opus and Fable have both been great. I don’t use it for code. Project organization, marketing and SEO, homelab, backups. Nothing where my livelihood depends on a build passing. Still, I keep looking at hardware and wondering if going local ever makes sense. Roughly $30k for something that runs a decent model at usable speed. Sounds insane, but if you use it daily for work it’s a tool you amortize, not an expense. People buy a car for the commute and nobody blinks. What stops me:
- Obsolescence. $30k that’s dead weight in two years because models or hardware move on is a bad bet. It’d need to hold up 5-6 years to make sense for one person. Nobody seems able to say whether that’s realistic.
- Privacy. I trust Anthropic reasonably and I’ve read the policy. But I’ve handed over far more about my projects and clients than I expected to, and I don’t love that it lives somewhere I don’t control. Not enough to stop. Enough to keep thinking about it.
- Scale. Maybe the unit isn’t one person. A small group splitting a rack changes the math a lot. What I’d like to hear: If you run local, what’s the setup and which open source models are actually worth it right now? How do you think about the hardware aging? Is a 5-year horizon delusional? Are there dedicated AI hosting providers that are genuinely privacy-friendly and run by companies worth trusting? Haven’t researched this, might be the real answer. Is local realistic for normal professional work yet, or does the gap stay this wide? submitted by /u/jimmyfoo10
Originally posted by u/jimmyfoo10 on r/ClaudeCode