I Spent $4,000 to Replace AI Coding Subscriptions. I Was (Mostly) Wrong.

Tattva Tarang

4 min read

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2 days ago

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A few weeks ago, I did what many engineers secretly think about doing.

I bought a maxed-out MacBook Pro with 128 GB of RAM.

The idea was simple:

What if instead of paying $100–$200 every month for AI coding tools, I just ran everything locally?

No subscriptions.
No rate limits.
No “model downgraded today, sorry.”

Just raw hardware and local models.

At first, the results felt almost unbelievable.

But after real work, real projects, and a lot of honest reflection, I realized my original hypothesis was flawed.

Here’s what actually happened.

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The Original Hypothesis: Hardware Beats Subscriptions

My thinking went like this:

• AI subscriptions are expensive
• Local models are getting better fast
• Apple Silicon + lots of RAM = serious local inference

So I ran an experiment.

I set up local coding models and tried to use them for day-to-day development work — real tasks, not toy prompts.