Everything's been trending down so far, so until evidence shows otherwise, I'd assume it will continue that trend. IMO the best time to buy local infra will be when that trend begins to asymptote.

There is so much down pressure, I cannot imagine the token/s price going up. It has been going down and will continue doing so, we are far from a plateau IMHO

Cost/task is probably a better metric to track than raw tokens. Here's Epoch AI's recent report that IMO tracks with my experience (5-10X improvement YoY): https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought

There are many overlapping/compounding curves all happening simultaneously pushing cost down, even on the same hardware - faster software, which includes improvements that massively improve memory/memory bandwidth efficiency for model (especially improved kvcache, specdec/MTP, expert loading becoming standard), improved architectures (no one using full attention, engrams), and a never-ending stream of training improvements.

I think one only has to look at Qwen 3.8 27B to see how top tier a smaller model (<15GB Q4) can be. IMO it's one of the first small models to be able to be run as an agentic coder (it's not quite Opus 4.6-level, but it's not that far off), and with MTP/DFlash2, it's runs surprisingly fast on consumer GPUs. The 30B-class MoEs run even faster, and with the right tuning/post-training I'm sure they can match frontier capabilities in many areas (including coding) over the next months. I think last year the open/local AI picture was a lot more grim than it feels like now, tbt.