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There is not anything that I can do locally that I could not do using paid services. Currently many of the paid services are so cheap, easy to use and so fast that it is not really worth the effort unless you are a glutton for punishment like myself, or you have spent a lot of money on hardware.

For $9.99 a month I have Google 1 Premium which gives me 2TB of Google Drive storage, nearly unlimited use of Gemini AI chat, and other perks including limited image and video generation. Before I started using this deal with Google, I generated most images locally with a tool called LTX Studio 2 which runs in their Windows or Linux App called LTX Desktop, and also use a Visual Programming Language (VPL) called ComfyUI which gives much more control over the process. Here is a description from Gemini which explains how this works.

https://gemini.google.com/share/0dafb36bdb5a

I also have a few more months of free Perplexity which was provided to just about anyone with a Samsung phone that gives access to several paid services for no charge.

As far as local AI (using your own computer) goes... the primary advantages are that after you download the models (LLMs) you do not need an internet connection, they are free and you can customize them for whatever purpose that you want. The disadvantages are that they are more complicated to setup, depending on your computer and the LLMs used they tend to be slower and the info available to the models to work with is typically not current depending on how you setup your system.

You can also use hybrid solutions with paid services through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that can save money compared to subscribing to multiple services depending on your usage patterns, or run local open source LLM’s (AI Models) which you can run for free at home.

Here is a video with a summary and commands you can cut and paste that explains how to set up either a VPS (Virtual Private Service) with Hostinger or a local computer with Ollama and LiteLLM. This system allows you to use both paid services and free local LLMs and easily choose whatever you want to use from a list that you setup.

https://gemini.google.com/share/4145e37cfd03

For a little more advanced usage if you want your computer to do programming with Claude Code it can add up to a lot of money, but if you use a hybrid system which is part paid and partially using free local LLM’s hosted on your own computer, it can save you a lot of money. Here is a summary with a link to a video that tells how to do this:

https://gemini.google.com/share/f5a247156a07