I ran the numbers: $500 GPU vs $2/month Claude API — which wins for indie devs?

I ran the numbers: $500 GPU vs $2/month Claude API — which wins for indie devs? Last week HN was lit up with a post: "$500 GPU outperforms Claude Sonnet on coding benchmarks." It got 170+ upvotes. The comments were heated. And it got me thinking: should I ditch my API setup and buy a GPU? So I actually ran the numbers. The GPU case (steel-manned) RTX 4070: ~$500 one-time Runs Qwen 2.5 Coder locally No per-token costs Works offline Benchmarks show competitive coding results If you're doing heavy, continuous inference — training, bulk processing, large context — a local GPU can be cheaper over 12-18 months. Fair point. The API case (what I actually do) curl https://api.simplylouie.com/v1/chat/completions \ -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "model": "claude-sonnet", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Review this code: ..."}] }' My cost: $2/month flat. (Via SimplyLouie ) No hardware. No noise. No power bill. No CUDA driver nightmares.