About LocalAIRun.com
An independent, no-login, vendor-neutral guide and calculator for running LLMs locally in 2026.
Who we are
LocalAIRun.com is a small, independent project run by practitioners who run local LLMs on everything from a MacBook Air to multi-GPU rigs. We're not affiliated with any model lab, hardware vendor, or cloud provider. We don't sell anything.
The site exists because in 2026 the local LLM ecosystem finally hit a tipping point: open-weight models match frontier closed models on most tasks, consumer hardware can run 30B+ parameter models comfortably, and the long-term cost advantage of self-hosting has become impossible to ignore. But the path from "I want to try a local LLM" to "I have a setup that works for me" is still full of misleading marketing, outdated benchmarks, and vendor lock-in.
What you'll find here
- Best-of rankings for every major model class — coding, chat, vision, reasoning, multimodal — updated as new releases drop.
- Hardware guides covering Apple Silicon (M-series), NVIDIA (RTX 40/50, RTX Spark), AMD (Strix Halo, RX 9000), and the surprising truth about consumer vs prosumer GPUs.
- A free, anonymous cost calculator that compares buying hardware upfront vs paying for an API subscription over 1, 3, and 5 years.
- A growing homelab section on networking, virtualization, and self-hosting — because the same hardware that runs LLMs is also the foundation of a great home lab.
What we won't do
No login. No tracking beyond basic Google Analytics.
All calculation state is kept in your browser's localStorage. We don't have accounts, we don't store your hardware, we don't sell data.
No affiliate links.
If we recommend a piece of hardware, it's because it actually works well — not because someone paid us.
No sponsored content.
Vendor "reviews" get labeled as such, and only appear in dedicated comparison articles, never inside our rankings.
No fabricated benchmarks.
Every number in our rankings links to a public source (Hugging Face, the model's paper, or a community leaderboard).
Editorial principles
- Real prices. Hardware and API subscription prices are checked monthly. We include power draw and electricity costs, not just sticker price.
- License matters. A model with a 700M-user commercial cap (Llama 4) is not the same as Apache 2.0 (Qwen3, gpt-oss, Mistral). We highlight this in every comparison.
- Hardware diversity. We don't recommend only Apple Silicon or only NVIDIA. Real users have real constraints — and the right answer for an M3 Pro is different from the right answer for a 4090.
- Honest about limitations. Local LLMs are not always the answer. For frontier capability, Claude 5 Opus and GPT-4.5 still lead. We say so.
Open data, open code
The site's content and data are in a public repository. Hardware prices, model capabilities, and the cost-calculation logic are all plain JSON. You can:
- Audit our numbers
- Submit corrections via pull request
- Fork the calculator for your own use
Contact
Found a bug? Wrong number? Missing model? Email [email protected] or open an issue on the public repo. We respond within a week.
Want to contribute a guide? We're always looking for practitioners with hands-on experience on niche setups (AMD ROCm, Snapdragon X Elite, Jetson Orin, etc.).
Thanks
To the open-weight model labs (Google DeepMind, Alibaba Qwen, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, DeepSeek, OpenAI gpt-oss team) for making this entire category possible. To the tool authors (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM, MLX, Exo, KoboldCpp) for making local inference actually pleasant. To the r/LocalLLaMA and r/homelab communities, whose bench reports and rig photos keep us honest.
— The LocalAIRun.com team