Used to be able to use Gemini Pro free in cline. Now the API limits are so low that you immediately get messages about needing to top up your wallet and API queries just don't go through. Back to using DeepSeek R1 free in cline (though even that eventually stops after a few hours and you have to wait until the next day for it to work again). Starting to look like I need to setup a local LLM for coding - which means it's time to seriously upgrade my PC (well, it's been about 10 years so it was getting to be time anyway)
By the time you breakeven on whatever you spend on a decent LLM capable build, your hardware will be too far behind to run whatever is best locally then. It's something that feels cheaper but with the pace of things, unless you are churning an insane amount of tokens, probably doesn't make sense. Never mind that local models running on 24 or 48GB are maybe around flash-lite in ability while being slower than SOTA models.
Local models are mostly for hobby and privacy, not really efficiency.
