> even at a glacial pace

If speed is truly not an issue, you can run Deepseek on pretty much any PC with a large enough swap file, at a speed of about one token every 10 minutes assuming a plain old HDD.

Something more reasonable would be a used server CPU with as many memory channels as possible and DDR4 ram for less than $2000.

But before spending big, it might be a good idea to rent a server to get a feel for it.