Hacker News story: The $2k Laptop That Replaced My $200/Month AI Subscription

The $2k Laptop That Replaced My $200/Month AI Subscription
Cloud AI pricing is per-token. The more useful your pipeline, the more it costs. I built a dual-model orchestration pattern that routes 80% of work to a free local model (Qwen3 8B on Ollama, GPU-accelerated) and only sends the synthesis/judgment stage to a cloud API. Cost for a 50-item research pipeline: $0.15-0.40 vs $8-15 all-cloud. Same output quality where it matters. Stack: RTX 5080 laptop, Ollama in Docker with GPU passthrough, PostgreSQL, Redis, Claude API for the final 20%. The pattern: scan locally → score locally → deduplicate locally → synthesize via cloud. Four stages, three are free. Gotchas I hit: Qwen3's thinking tokens through /api/generate (use /api/chat instead), Docker binding to IPv4 only while Windows resolves localhost to IPv6, and GPU memory ceilings on consumer cards. Happy to share architecture details in comments. 2 comments on Hacker News.
Cloud AI pricing is per-token. The more useful your pipeline, the more it costs. I built a dual-model orchestration pattern that routes 80% of work to a free local model (Qwen3 8B on Ollama, GPU-accelerated) and only sends the synthesis/judgment stage to a cloud API. Cost for a 50-item research pipeline: $0.15-0.40 vs $8-15 all-cloud. Same output quality where it matters. Stack: RTX 5080 laptop, Ollama in Docker with GPU passthrough, PostgreSQL, Redis, Claude API for the final 20%. The pattern: scan locally → score locally → deduplicate locally → synthesize via cloud. Four stages, three are free. Gotchas I hit: Qwen3's thinking tokens through /api/generate (use /api/chat instead), Docker binding to IPv4 only while Windows resolves localhost to IPv6, and GPU memory ceilings on consumer cards. Happy to share architecture details in comments.