Also learn how to navigate the Hugging Face site. I now have a model running locally on my MacBook, using LM Studio. It’s probably good enough for 80% of the tasks I need AI for. I also have a Claude Pro account for the ‘heavy lifting’, but by offloading other tasks to my local machine, it saves tokens.
What model?
Local is how these tools, whatever form they take when the rush is all said and done, will be utilized.
Noting that you didn’t mention Civitai Red...
You don’t even need a high-powered PC - there’s over 20,000 GPUs for rent at Vast.ai - $5 will get you started.
Were you spending that much on tokens to justify running LM Studio locally? I did a personal coding project and Claude Code asked for one additional token purchase. I did keep bumping up against time limits, though.
The point is to use more tokens !