M5 Ultra Local AI Costs vs. OpenRouter

New Studio M5 Ultra ready for local home AI lab? I compared it to OpenRouter prices.

512GB will be available from October, and I guess that the price will be around 15-17k.

Let's see how much it will cost to run a proper openweight model at home:

• DeepSeek V4 Pro: 2 Macs, $32–34k
• Kimi K3 and GLM-5.3: 4 Macs, $64–69k

At 100 output tokens/sec, 24/7, compared with OpenRouter prices today, the hardware payback would be:

• Kimi K3: 16–18 months
• DeepSeek V4 Pro: 36–39 months
• GLM-5.3: 56–60 months

K3 makes sense for a privacy first fully local setup.