If you’ve got something consuming 100 watts average over your 24 hour period, and your electricity costs 20 cents per kWh, you’re already spending almost as much as a Claude subscription.
Just on electricity, this assumes your hardware never fails and you never incur any additional costs.
There’s a big reason why newer more efficient hardware is in demand. Something that’s 10+ years old has drastically worse performance per watt.
Obviously I am not saying to throw away your old hardware as a rule but there is a point where some of this old stuff just isn’t even worth running.
An Apple M4 chip in a Mac mini has 16MB on the P-cores and 4MB on the E-cores.
Depending on use case, AMD 3D V-cache at almost 100MB could also work out quite well.
So really, if you wait long enough, consumer chips end up with a pretty similar amount of cache.
Claude subscription pricing is a broken way to consider footprint.
As long as performance is useable (apply your own metrics!), pulling it from existing hardware is likely the option with the lower eco footprint.
Also: chances are it'll only be used for this purpose occasionally, and/or for a short while. In that scenario [fabricating new hardware] always has the bigger eco footprint.