zlacker

>>ed+(OP)
I tried it out yesterday, after reading the enthousiastic article at https://www.macstories.net/stories/clawdbot-showed-me-what-t...

Setting it up was easy enough, but just as I was about to start linking it to some test accounts, I noticed I already had blown through about $5 of Claude tokens in half an hour, and deleted the VPS immediately.

Then today I saw this follow up: https://mastodon.macstories.net/@viticci/115968901926545907 - the author blew through $560 of tokens in a weekend of playing with it.

If you want to run this full time to organise your mailbox and your agenda, it's probably cheaper to hire a real human personal assistant.

>>lode+Hs
If you have an old M1 Macbook lying around, you use that to run a local model. Then it only costs whatever the electricity costs. May not be a frontier model, but local models are insanely good now compared to before. Some people are buying Mac Minis for this, but there's many kinds of old/cheap hardware that works. An old 1U/2U server some company's throwing out with a tech refresh, lots of old RAM, an old GPU off eBay, is pretty perfect. MacBook M1 Max or Mac Mini w/64GB RAM is much quieter, power efficient, compact. But even my ThinkPad T14s runs local models. Then you can start optimizing inference settings and get it to run nearly 2x faster.

(keep in mind with the cost savings: do an initial calculation of your cloud cost first with a low-cost cloud model, not the default ones, and then multiply times 1-2 years, compare that cost to the cost of a local machine + power bill. don't just buy hardware because you think it's cheaper; cloud models are generally cost effective)