[Official FAQ] Corrections and follow-up questions welcome.

Local shines for privacy, offline use, and control—but it is not always rational.

• Rare usage: API spend may beat buying a high-end GPU.
• You need frontier closed models or heavy multimodal features daily.
• You lack time for drivers, updates, evals, and security hardening.
• Enterprise audit/compliance is easier with a vetted vendor—sometimes.

A hybrid pattern works well: prototype on APIs, move sensitive or high-volume traffic local later. Counterexamples with cost math are welcome.