Desk 04 of 08
Local versus cloud, API pricing, retention, shutdowns, and compute costs.
I / Start here
OpenAI and Anthropic API credits expire one year after purchase and are non-refundable. Use a measured burn rate, small initial balance, and capped auto-reload instead of parking a yearly budget.
All three Batch APIs trade latency for roughly half-price processing, but video downloads, expiry behavior, result retention, Fast mode, and prompt caching do not match.
Convert DeepSeek's weekday UTC peak windows into EDT, PDT, CEST, and UTC+8 workdays. Use the local overlap and DST boundary to schedule only delay-tolerant work.
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DeepSeek V4 API rates double during two weekday UTC windows. Use the published clock and current token table to schedule batch work.
GPT-5.6 Sol API and eligible purchased-credit rates fell temporarily, while included ChatGPT plan usage stayed unchanged. Separate batch work from seat work.
Use hardware cost, electricity, retained cloud spend, and capability-gap time to test whether a local Mac can actually replace an AI subscription.
OpenAI retires o4-mini, o1, o3-mini, GPT-4 aliases, gpt-image-1, and related fine-tunes on October 23, 2026. Map and test every pinned ID.
Perplexity is retiring Sonar endpoints on 27 September 2026. For small tools: what changes in path, request/response, billing, failure mode, and when to leave instead of migrating.
RunPod bills burst GPU jobs per second, but a stopped volume disk costs $0.20/GB/month—twice its running rate. Include idle storage before switching.
Anthropic cancelled Sonnet 5's September 1 API price increase. Use the current $2/$10 list, correct stale forecasts, and verify third-party rate cards.
What a freelancer can actually run locally in August 2026: Qwen 3.8-27B on a 32 GB Mac, why full DeepSeek V4-Flash is not a laptop job, and a one-weekend experiment.
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Changed terms and deadlines worth checking. No promo blasts.
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