Apple Silicon costs three times more than OpenRouter

Summary

If you're evaluating local inference for production agents, hardware amortization dominates cost—not electricity. Speed matters more: cloud providers deliver 60–70 tokens/sec vs. your 10–20 local. For salary-bearing developers, token cost is noise; latency kills productivity.

Why it matters

If you're evaluating local inference for production agents, hardware amortization dominates cost—not electricity. Speed matters more: cloud providers deliver 60–70 tokens/sec vs. your 10–20 local. For salary-bearing developers, token cost is noise; latency kills productivity.

Sources

1. 1.~50-100 watts under load, and ~$0.20 per kWh, my M5 MacbookPro will cost a few cents per hour
2. 2.ammortized costs of ~$1.50 per million tokens
3. 3.Openrouter for comparable models is 1/3rd the price and ~2x the speed
4. 4.10-40 tokens per second range for a serious model like Gemma4:31b
5. 5.OpenRouter has Gemma4 31b at ~38-50 cents per million tokens
6. 6.Local inference is slower than cloud inference. Some of the gemma 4 providers on openrouter get up to 60-70 tokens per second, which is 3-7 times faster than what I'm seeing with the pro max (~10-20 tokens per second)