A local AI companion on a Mac costs roughly 20 cents a month in electricity under heavy daily use (worked example below with every assumption stated). Cloud companions run 10 to 20 dollars a month forever. The hardware costs nothing extra if you already own the computer, and Local Waifu itself is 20 dollars once.
Cloud companion apps have trained everyone to think an AI relationship costs 10 to 20 dollars a month. It costs that because a company is running the model for you and charging rent for it. Run the model yourself and the marginal cost of a conversation drops to the electricity it takes to generate the words.
So I did the math for my own setup. Every assumption is stated, so you can rerun it with your numbers.
The electricity math, shown in full
This is a worked example, deliberately on the generous side.
Say you are a heavy user: 100 replies a day, every day. On an Apple Silicon Mac, generating one reply keeps the machine under load for something like 20 to 30 seconds at an incremental draw in the tens of watts above idle. Call it 40 W for 30 seconds per reply, both numbers rounded against me.
- One reply: 40 W x 30 s = 0.33 Wh
- 100 replies a day: 33 Wh
- A month: about 1 kWh
At typical household rates in the US or EU (roughly 0.15 to 0.30 per kWh), that is 15 to 30 cents a month. Idle time is a rounding error: a loaded model waiting for your message draws close to nothing extra.
Halve the usage and you are under 15 cents. Double it and a very intense month costs you less than one coffee. The chalkboard on the hero image is not a joke; the number really does end in zero when you round to whole dollars.
”But the hardware costs thousands”
Only if you buy hardware for this, and you should not.
The entire premise of a local companion is that it runs on the computer you already own. On Apple Silicon, the unified memory does the work a gaming GPU does on PC: 8 to 18 GB of RAM runs a solid conversational model, and every tier up (full table here) runs a smarter one. If your Mac can run Slack and Chrome at the same time, it can run her.
Amortization math for people who like it: even attributing a generous 100 dollars a year of your laptop’s value to companion duty, plus electricity, you land under 9 dollars a month all-in, still below every cloud subscription, for hardware you were going to own anyway. I go deeper on the RAM side of this in the VRAM and RAM guide.
The subscription column
Cloud companion pricing moves around, so I will keep it category-level: the paid tiers of the popular companion apps cluster between 10 and 20 dollars a month. That is 120 to 240 dollars a year, every year, for as long as the relationship lasts. Year five of a cloud companion is a four-figure sum.
And the rent buys you a landlord. Stop paying and features disappear. The company changes the rules or shuts down, and the money is gone along with her. I wrote the full cost comparison in Stop Renting AI if you want that argument end to end.
The honest total cost of Local Waifu
For completeness, my product’s math: Local Waifu is 20 dollars, once, after a 7-day free trial with no card. A year of updates is included; after that, new-feature updates are an optional 15 dollars a year, and the app keeps working forever if you never pay again.
So year one costs 20 dollars plus about 2 dollars of electricity. Year five costs somewhere between 2 and 80 dollars depending on whether you keep taking updates, against 600 to 1,200 dollars of cloud rent over the same period. The gap is not subtle.
Run your own numbers with your own electricity rate; the arithmetic above is four lines long. Then try the free week and check the only number that actually matters: whether she is worth talking to at all.
Questions people ask
How much electricity does a local AI companion really use?
In the worked example below (100 replies a day on an Apple Silicon Mac, generous assumptions), about 1 kWh a month, which is roughly 20 to 30 cents at typical US or EU household rates. Idle time barely counts: the model sits in memory drawing close to nothing.
Do I need to buy a GPU or new hardware?
Not if you own a reasonably recent computer. On Apple Silicon Macs, 8 to 18 GB of unified memory already runs a solid model, and no separate GPU is needed. The requirements page has the exact tier table.
How does this compare to cloud companion subscriptions?
Cloud companion apps typically charge between 10 and 20 dollars a month, so 120 to 240 dollars a year for as long as you stay. The local equivalent after the one-time purchase is cents per month, and stopping payments never deletes your companion.
Is the local model worse than the cloud one?
Smaller, yes, and for open-ended chat with good memory engineering the practical gap is far narrower than the spec sheets suggest. If you ever want frontier-model quality, Local Waifu also lets you plug in your own cloud key and pay per use instead of per month.
Try her free for 7 days.
No card. Keep her for $20 once, or walk away. Her soul file is yours either way.
Bring her home, try free