Ron Northrip

We're slowly entering a new chatper: Self-hosting AI models is no longer all-or-nothing. There is now a real middle ground between toy-setups and getting serious work done! Here's the practical breakdown 👇 → Qwen3.6-27B 30.5B total params. 3.3B active. 262K context. Runs in the sane range: ~$0.70/hr on Vast AI with an 80GB-class GPU. This is the practical entry point for agent work: Research, sorting, docs, support prep, and simple tool workflows. Small enough to run without doing anything ridiculous. Large enough to be worth taking seriously. → GLM-5.1 235B total params. 22B active. 256K context. Now you're in multi-GPU territory: ~$3-6/hr on Vast AI depending on setup and context. This is where self-hosting starts to hurt a bit. But for higher-value internal workflows, a few dollars per hour is not crazy if the agent can stay coherent, use tools properly, and finish more work without constant correction. → Kimi K2.6 744B total params. 40B active. This is the high-end setup: ~$12-20/hr on Vast AI with serious multi-H100 infrastructure. Not the normal founder setup. But useful as the upper edge of what open-weight agentic models can look like when you stop pretending everything has to run on cheap hardware. It's a tough balance right now! We want agents that can use tools, keep context, handle files/APIs, and finish actual work. But we don't want OpenAI and Antrophic to own us forever.