I Ditched OpenAI and Run AI Locally for Free — Here's How

I Ditched OpenAI and Run AI Locally for Free — Here's How I was spending ~$80/month on API calls. ChatGPT Plus, some Anthropic credits, the occasional Gemini Pro request. It adds up fast when you're prototyping things. Then I discovered you can run surprisingly good models on hardware you probably already own. I've been running a fully local AI setup for about a month now, and my API bill went to zero. Here's the exact setup I'm using. The Hardware (Nothing Fancy) My main inference machine is a desktop PC with an RTX 3060 (12GB VRAM). You can find these used for ~$150. That's it. No A100, no cloud GPU rental. For context: 8B parameter models (like Qwen 3.5) run at ~40 tokens/sec on this card 30B parameter models (like Qwen 3 Coder) run at a comfortable ~12 tokens/sec Even on a MacBook M1 with 16GB RAM, 8B models are perfectly usable If you have any modern GPU with 8GB+ VRAM, or an Apple Silicon Mac, you're good. Step 1: Install Ollama This is the part that surprised me. No Docker, no c