Published May 15, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT Aggy is a writer and editor who has worked for many high-traffic digital publications. He's a technology and gaming fanboy who has been a writer, editor, consultant, and computer animator. AI coding tools are genuinely useful, but the subscriptions stack up fast. If you're running more than one at a time, you're spending serious money on tools you might not even use every day. Running models locally cuts all of that out once the hardware is paid for, and you'd be wrong if you thought local LLMs weren't good enough that you're not really giving up much to make the switch. Subscriptions for coding assistants are a heavy monthly tax that adds up quickly Premium AI tools changed how people write code, but the costs add up fast. Services like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT Plus each run around $20 a month, and if you're using more than one, that's a noticeable chunk of your budget disappearing every month.…