DeepSeek V4 being 17x cheaper got me to actually measure what I send to cloud vs what I could run locally. the results are stupid.

That foodtruck bench post showing deepseek v4 matching gpt-5.2 at 17x cheaper got me thinking. if frontier cloud models are that overpriced for equivalent quality, how much of my daily work even needs cloud at all? Ran my normal coding workflow for 10 days. every task got logged: what it was, tokens in/out, whether local qwen 3.6 27b (on a 3090) could have done it. didn't use benchmarks, just re-ran a random sample of 150 tasks on both. results: - file reads, project scanning, "explain this code": local matched cloud 97% of the time. this was 35% of my workload.