It's not that far off anymore. On my 7900 XTX 24GB, I can run Qwen3.8 27B with 131K context at Q4_K_M (55 tok/s with MTP). Excluding hardware cost, it's about $0.02 tok/M in and $0.40 tok/M out (cached in $0.0001). On OpenRouter, that would cost more than 10x what it actually costs me.

Of course, 131k context at 4-bit quant is a trade off, but even then, it's VERY capable. It doesn't feel that far behind something like GPT 5.6 Luna.