Unless you have special needs like very high usage, privacy or other ones depicted in the article, buying another computer many hundred dollars for the unique purpose of running local models is a hard sell.

If you use their API instead of their sub-based offers, the most popular models are cheap to use and with BYOK tools, switching model is as easy as entering another string in a form.

For instance I put $15 on my OpenAI account in August 2023, since then I used Dall-E weekly and I still got more than $5 credit left!