I pay for my tokens for my own projects, at least when the ones Google seems willing to keep throwing at me for free don't cut it. I'd think that's not too uncommon, especially here where there's likely a high ratio of hobby coders (whether also professionals or otherwise).
Free tier Gemini is good enough for my personal projects and hopefully a local model can replace it before i ever personally pay for a single token from anyone.
local models are getting pretty close. they still require some serious hardware to run at a reasonable rate but they're about smart enough to be useful.
Yeah i just don't have the hardware to run them at a reasonable rate and am not ready to invest that much at today's prices. My tinkering with DeepSeek last year was promising but the minutes-per-response made it unusable.
