Nowadays I fire off async jobs that involve 1000s of requests, billion of tokens, yet it costs basically the same as if I didn't.
Maybe it takes a different type of person, than the one I am, but all these "pay-as-you-go"/tokens/credits platforms make me nervous to use, and I end up not using it or spending time trying to "optimize", while investing in hardware and infrastructure I can run at home and use that seems to be no problem for my head to just roll with.
And just because you're mostly using local models doesn't mean you can't use API hosted models in specific contexts. Of course, then the same dread sets in, but if you can do 90% of the tokens with local models and 10% with pay-per-usage API hosted models, you get the best of both worlds.
