Your data goes where you point it
Local
Your documents never leave your network. The model, the prompts, and the outputs all stay on your machine. There is no vendor logging your files or learning from your usage.
Cloud
Everything you paste or upload goes to a third party. Policies vary, but the default assumption should be: the vendor can see it, store it, and in some cases use it for training.
Cost shape is different, not always cheaper
Local
Hardware is a one-time purchase (a Solo box is roughly $4,000-7,000 all in, hardware at cost plus a flat $2,400 service fee). After that, marginal cost per query is near zero - run all day, every day. The trade: you are out that up front whether you use it daily or monthly.
Cloud
Pay per use. A casual user might spend $20-100/month; a heavy team can hit $500-2,000+/month and still be capped by seat limits. It is the right shape for light or unpredictable usage - and the wrong shape for a team that runs AI all day.
Break-even is real: most heavy daily users cross it within 6-18 months. The Assessment will estimate yours.
Capability: cloud is still ahead at the very top
Local
A single 24-32GB GPU runs 7B-32B models at useful speeds - genuinely excellent for drafting, summarization, document analysis, and coding assistance. Multi-GPU builds reach 70B-class territory. What you cannot do on a small business budget: match the absolute frontier models.
Cloud
The largest frontier models are still more capable than anything you can run on a single node - for the hardest reasoning tasks. For most practical business workloads, though, the gap has gotten small, and local models keep closing it every quarter.
Availability and control
Local
Works whenever your power is on. No rate limits, no outages, no deprecations, no terms-of-service changes, no surprise price hikes. Your throughput is yours.
Cloud
Depends on the vendor's uptime, quotas, and roadmap. Models get deprecated, APIs change, prices move. It is a dependency you rent, not own.
Effort and upkeep
Local
You operate a system: updates, model refreshes, monitoring. That is exactly what we are for - every Forge build includes training, and Forge Care exists for the upkeep. If you do not want to touch any of it, that changes the math.
Cloud
Zero upkeep. Open a tab, type, done. For a non-technical individual with light usage, that convenience can outweigh everything above.
The verdict
Where each side actually wins.
Local wins clearly
- You handle sensitive data (legal, medical, financial, client PII)
- Your team uses AI daily, all day - subscription costs are already real
- You want capability you own, with no vendor dependencies
- You want to learn the technology, not rent it
Cloud is fine (we will tell you)
- Casual, occasional use with no sensitive data
- You need frontier-class reasoning for hard one-off problems
- You would rather spend $20/month than $4,000 up front - and use it monthly, not daily
Hybrid (very common)
- Run the daily, repetitive, and private work locally; call the cloud for the occasional frontier task
- Start Solo, keep cloud accounts for overflow until usage justifies a Team build
- Sensitive work on-prem; marketing and brainstorming in the cloud
Still deciding?
Take the two-minute assessment and get an honest recommendation for your specific workloads and budget - including "cloud is fine for you," if that is what the numbers say.