# AI on a budget

- Page: https://shared.btbytes.com/p/ai-on-a-budget
- Date: 2025-08-10
- Tags: llm

What if you do not want to use [AI SaaS](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/ai-saas) products for any reason (monetary - subscriptions add up quick, privacy - do not want share your data with companies, etc.,)?

One approach is to use [local-llm](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/local-llm) on your laptop, or pc. You might also be ok with doing so on a cloud hosted instance where you get to control the entire stack.

Another approach is to use some of the "free tier"  as seen here --  [How I Code with AI on a budget/free](https://wuu73.org/blog/aiguide1.html); [via HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44850913).

> Every month so many new models come out. My new fav is GLM-4.5... Kimi K2 is also good, and Qwen3-Coder 480b, or 2507 instruct.. very good as well. All of those work really well in any agentic environment/in agent tool