The $599 GPU That Made Developers Quit the Cloud

The r/LocalLLaMA post that set this conversation off was not framed as advocacy. It was a compatibility list — 46 models, one consumer GPU, no editorializing ^[1]. The community supplied the editorial. What spread was not the technical claim but the financial implication: if this hardware runs what I'm billing through the cloud, what am I actually paying for? That question, asked by developers running real workloads and real monthly expenses, converted a benchmark into an argument about pricing structure.