I did the math, it just doesn't check out, especially if you take into account time to generate and electricity. Even assuming you generate 100 tok/second, 24

I did the math, it just doesn't check out, especially if you take into account time to generate and electricity. Even assuming you generate 100 tok/second, 24 hr, that's only 8 mil tokens. About $5 for Gemini 2.5 Flash or $50 for 2.5 Pro. But you will not be able to run it 24/7 locally - sleep, thinking between prompts, etc Even at continuous usage (24 hr/day), it's still cheaper to just pay Google for Gemini 2.5 Flash tokens for half a year. And this is NOT taking into account that mistral/devstral/qwen3 are vastly inferior models. How can Google be so cheap? TPUs, batching multiple requests, economy of scale, loss-leader, ... Running stuff locally makes sense for fun, as backup for loss of connectivity, if you want to try uncensored models, but it doesn't make sense economically.