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Comment by Kevin_Flynn | Hacker News Reader

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That comparison is nonsensical, it exploits a vulnerability in the retail system in order to not pay for the hardware at all.

On the other hand, if you do include the cost of the hardware it doesn't seem change the overall conclusion.

I'm not exploiting vulnerabilities, im calculating "risk" on the transaction.

You're trading goodwill for greed.

They told me I could return it.

They gave me a 90 day evaluation window.

They did this because it benefits them.

I paid 35% above retail for the card.

And I'm the greedy one ? really ?

Someone needs redpilled on how the monkey planet really works, which was the entire point of this post.

We can choose to spend months crying about card prices and waiting for christmas, or ...

We can choose to analyse the market, calculate risk for our projects, and move forward confidently after doing so.

Or, we can stand on the sidelines and throw rocks at the marathon contestants because they pooped on our lawn.

Choose wisely.

You're a dishonest person who seized a mechanism that improves our consumer experience for your personal gain.

Yes

Edit: I do like that you came back to edit a whole bunch more into your reasoning. So I'll do the same.

I like that you describe yourself as someone who shits on other people's lawns.

I fully believe that you randomly shit on other people's lawns but this marathon you've imagined yourself in is pure delusion.

Thank you for the kind words.

I wish you much success in life.

If you’re returning a product you used because you wanted to pretend it was a rental at the seller’s expense, bluntly, you’re as much the problem as the seller.

Thank you for contributing to current year.

Everyone in the heirachy above you is an exploitative business psychopath. Might as well exploit their calculated greed as they attempt to exploit your empathy.

Yes, that does continue the cycle.

Seems like a great way to help the species get a bit lower still.

Calculating the financial risk of a transaction before committing to it is a problem to you ?

MBA school calls it responsible corporate stewardship.

No, as I said, it’s committing said transaction and then reversing it at the expense of the other party that I take issue with.

As for MBA school, don’t really give a shit how it is colorfully worded to attempt to excuse it.

That card will only run a tiny model though, no?

Exactly. A lot of stupid tokens has applications, but it's not a plug-in replacement for a subscription for most.

... yet.

In fact I'm running qwen3.8-flash-next with a Playwright-mcp docker and it is far better for scraping than my ChatGPT or Claude subscription, for the simple reason that sites aren't lying to Playwright.

I don't understand, your subscription models can also use Playwright, you don't even need to setup an mcp, they'll automatically download playwright-cli and get going.

Sites don't lie to Claude operated Playwright either.

Not to invalidate your point, just saying it's a bit of a straw man.

Sure, but that's not what the subscription uses.

You can just tell it to use playwright instead of the browser skill. This has nothing do with the subscription but with how tool discovery works.

Yes, but even the smaller models, when used within a harness and orchestrator, can be accurate enough for real work, especially when combined or validated by other smaller models.

The 5060 wasn't the fastest/$, it just provided the most VRAM / $ as of yesterday.

Im installing it in a box with a 4070 Ti to run 2 different models simultaneously. Coder + MoE via paperclip or multica.

I see it at $770/GPU, or $48/1GB vram

That probably is the cheapest per 1 GB vram right now. However, the R9700 a few months ago was only $1350/32GB or $42/1GB VRAM. And everyone knew it, because the card is now $1800 or so with supply issues.

I think the market discovered the reasonable min is 32GB. That runs Qwen3.8 Q6 with 100k+ context all in vram. 24GB does not.

Depending on RAM - it can run a big one veeeeeeeery slowly

> to use this card for 3 months and return it.

You're counting on most people being willing to abuse a return policy like that. Also, the 3 month return window must've activated 3 days ago. These prices didn't start just then.

> to use this card for 3 months and return it.

You can also keep it and return a bag of flour weighing the same.

Or even go to people houses and rob them at gun point to steal their hardware.

You're comparing apples to oranges. 109 million tokens is ~nothing, easily a day's worth of casual use. Compare price per token and cloud providers are probably much closer. But even that isn't a fair comparison between cloud AI providers and abusing retailer return policies just yet, because usable local models even remotely comparable to the frontier don't fit in 16gb of vram.

Yeah I did something similar but more extensive, because not every model is same plus depend on your options how much you want to degrade model from fp8. Some models is just slow on local hardware and not practical really.

localaicost.com

To be fair we don't know which direction that arbitrage will collapse to.

Missing from this analysis:

    - rate at which tokens are generated
    - quality of generated tokens
    - ethics of abusing return policies
    - long-term viability of abusing return policies

> it can process approximately 109.3 million tokens per month.

quality determined by model(s) and model size(s), not card size.

no return policy has been abused, you imagined this.

the plan was for 1 card today.

RIF.

Yeah, and Qwen 3B that you run on 16GB of VRAM and 10K context length surely is comparable to whatever subscription you're comparing to, that also gives access to 3B parameter models? You might want to take actual use cases into account before you try this scam in real life.

I too did a cost breakdown of buying my GPU for ~10K EUR more than a year ago. It came out "Invaluable" as I use it for analyzing my diary, financials and other private things I cannot send to random 3rd parties.

But even the best of models you can run with 96GB VRAM really doesn't come close to the hosted SOTA models, sadly.

> before you try this scam in real life.

What scam are you speaking of ? The return window ?

I don't plan on returning it, unless the economics of upgrading in 89 days favor doing so.

The point was to calculate "my risk" on the transaction.

As for the results of the calculation, I didn't invent math or risk.

For $80 total "risk", I can get 10+ programmers worth of work for 3 months. A much better gamble than paying per token.

> What scam are you speaking of ? The return window ?

Your calculation seems to have depended on "Buy this hardware with the explicit intention of returning it" process, which is a scam. If you buy hardware you do so with the intent of keeping it, otherwise you find renters, if you don't like scams.

So if you don't plan to return it, wouldn't the cost at minimum be the cost of the GPU??? Why count on returning it if you don't plan to do so?

I am seeing nobody liking what you said, but you are not wrong.

Thankfully, the environment we are all forced to live in, doesn't care what we think about it, and adapting to it accurately at minimal expense is the difference between surviving and thriving.

What people don't like is the environment, and they just decided to stone my post to death for adapting to it, instead of doing the same.

People are just being people.

I'm a much easier target than that Sam guy, who locked up 40% of the planets GPU's using purchase orders, with no obligation to follow through.

He's an untouchable elite. I'm much easier to mug.

We are all opportunists.

The entire thinking behind the post, was spawned by the article the other day, about the "video game construction kit" guy, bragging about spending $3.1 million a month on tokens in an article, with $0 revenue.

Firstly you are assuming $0.048$/hr for GPU, which is highly misleading and you can easily sell it for double(vast.ai is $0.12) as you are forgetting lot of cost like CPU, cooling etc.

Also even if you can somehow fit a few 100 billion parameter model(like gpt 6 luna or deepseek flash) in 16GB, and magically assume you can run at 200 tokens/sec according to your calculation, the blended cost of it would be around $100, not $1639.

I remember when the top GPU was 550€ and the overclocked, custom-cased, water-cooling ready version cost 660€ tops. Any GPU price out there even $800 for 5060Ti from january 2025 is not only out of any sane band, but look as if we're in a ultra-recession, yet other markets aren't affected nearly as extreme.

I bought two 2TB SSDs from TeamGroup last year, about $100/ssd. I put them side by side in a raid setup for my home server. (I wanted raid, and they were less than half the price of Samsung, etc.). I'm on a budget, so I went with the cheap ones and raid reduduncy vs one expensive one with no reduduncy.

The exact same ones are now pushing $300/ssd and Samsung's (which was $300 18 months ago) is now $500.

The prices are insane.

And imagine if you just stole electricity and GPU. It would be $0 vs 1639.50... The bubble becomes even more obvious!

You're comparing running a heavily quantized 10-30B model to running a multi trillion one. Being half the price (unless you expect to only need AI 3 months in your life) is absolutely not a good deal, here.

What it does buy, though, is privacy and freedom (nobody can decide to "change the terms" to milk you more).

You are exploiting a loophole. Calculate the differential if you use one of those "don't buy electronics, just rent them!" services.

This is such a boneheaded comparison.

It’s akin to saying “the new iPhone costs $2.5k, it weighs 250 g, I can get a piece of scrap aluminium for $30, checkmate liberals.”

Not sure that Kantian ethics supports the population mass buying Amazon cards for 90 day periods and then returning them en-masse.

This seems more like a sociopathic "hack" than an actual comment on the economy of selfhost vs inference-as-a-service.

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