> Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but it seems like Anthropic has quietly 4x'd the real cost of the Pro plan. There are 168 hours in a week, and if I'm able to (safely) bet on 40 hours of use, realistically, I just lost 75% of the value of the plan.

I think you're just confused about what the Pro plan was, it never included being used for 168 hours/week, and was extremely clear that it was limited.

> What are the reasonable local alternatives? 128 GB of ram, reasonably-newish-proc, 12 GB of vram? I'm okay waitign for my machine to burn away on LLM experiments I'm running, but I don't want to simply stop my work and wake up at 3 AM to start working again..

a $10k mac mini with 192GB of vram with any model you can download still isn't close to Claude Sonnet.