AI Coding at Home Without Going Broke
Summary
The article compares three at-home AI coding approaches—self-hosting, API-based hosting, and frontier subscriptions—and argues that most users benefit from blending the last two. It provides cost guidelines and practical tradeoffs to help individuals and SMBs optimize for performance and expense. It ends with a rule of thumb to mix high-quality, computationally heavy tasks with cheaper, open-source models.