From a strategic standpoint of privacy, cost and control, I immediately went for local models, because that allowed to baseline tradeoffs and it also made it easier to understand where vendor lock-in could happen, or not get too narrow in perspective (e.g. llama.cpp/open router depending on local/cloud [1] ).
With the explosion of popularity of CLI tools (claude/continue/codex/kiro/etc) it still makes sense to be able to do the same, even if you can use several strategies to subsidize your cloud costs (being aware of the lack of privacy tradeoffs).
I would absolutely pitch that and evals as one small practice that will have compounding value for any "automation" you want to design in the future, because at some point you'll care about cost, risks, accuracy and regressions.
[1] - https://alexhans.github.io/posts/aider-with-open-router.html
I also highly suggest OpenCode. You'll get the same Claude Code vibe.
If your computer is not beefy enough to run them locally, Synthetic is a bless when it comes to providing these models, their team is responsive, no downtime or any issue for the last 6 months.
Full list of models provided : https://dev.synthetic.new/docs/api/models
Referal link if you're interested in trying it for free, and discount for the first month : https://synthetic.new/?referral=kwjqga9QYoUgpZV