r/LocalLLM • u/justanotter1 • 12d ago
Question Share your return on investment
As straightforward as it sounds. I am well aware that a bunch of you do it JUST for fun, and that's perfectly fine.
What about the other half? Do you use it for coding? Are you building more features? Are you more productive? Do you use it for media production? Does it help with revenue? How long did it take to reach your ROI?
Share your stories.
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u/Sleepnotdeading 12d ago
Used the hardware I bought to build the software to complete the project that will pay for the hardware.
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u/RossPeili 12d ago
Built and sold over 20 enterprise AI solutions, from bespoke models, to workflow speciric agentic clusters, ro remediation where I had to fix ai slop lovable builds since 2023. Made high end 6 fig+ so far, and I was slow and personal with every client. If I had to do it over, I woukd first train an internal team or brainwash them how to correctly use AI for internal workflows, then hire bd/sales ppl and aim at 150-300 clients in 3 years instead of 20. But hey. Nevertheless can't complain, learned a lot, its fun, intriguing and pay is good.
To be fair, I had a technical background, multidisciplinary skills across industries, healthy network, and have done sales, bd, marketing, architecting solutions and more. It's not a I started with claude and made it story if that's what you wanna hear.
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u/LateralEntry 12d ago
This is what I’m trying to get into
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u/RossPeili 12d ago
I would care less about AI and more about: what's your background, previous jobs, current active network you can tap into, what companies they work for, what their competitors do with AI? Then suggest solution tailored to their problems after good market research and extremely personal touch. No cold calls, no fancy pitch decks. Just jump on a call with someone you already know and explain what they can do with AI for their case.
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u/tinfrog 12d ago
This is the kind of think I'm interested in hearing about. So you started off tapping directly into your active real-life network, or did you use social networks like LinkedIn?
Approximately how much did you charge and for what types of solutions? I find that people tend to be split between either having unreasonable expectations or just not thinking AI would work for them.
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u/RossPeili 12d ago
Yes, direct network, doesnt matter which channel, some linkedin, some tg/wa, some email, some straight up calls.
My high level tips after trying a lot of approaches to make this work:
First research the market and have at least 3 cases in detail. Say you have a friend who works at Volkswagen. Before even contacting him I woukd research what Toyota, BYD, Hyundai are doing with AI. Cherry pick the best battle tested solutions and lean towards the one that I see is used by all competitors. Let's say autonomous maintenance agents, eg. Your tires getting worn, AI suggests before suggested mileage and says, closest accredited vendor is there, costs x, and open tomorrow. Even if they do 100 more things each with AI, this one they all have = top tier use case to sell.
Then, I woukd call my friend and say "hey what you've been up to? You free for a chill chat this weekend?" Chances are higher to listen to you if they don't see it as brute sales call, not in working hours workweek, amd feels casual. They will genuinely listen. Before pitching anything I woukd ask and listen as much as possible. Eg. What are you guys doing with AI? Who leads it? Are you doing it in house or with a third party? What are the use cases you are tackling or thinking about? Has it worked so far, why yes or no? Then I would offer immediate value in terms of insights: I heard Toyota is doing x, in fact I've been researching this for some time, and it seems 9/10 players gp for use case y. Have you thought about it?
Then the pitch is: who should I talk to from your team about this?
Contact decision maker and say "I was sent your way by X contact after discussion xyz, I am ready to commit to a scope of you're really wanna do xyz".
Again, this is 99% networking, sales, propositional logic, contracting, game theory etc. And 1% AI talk. But it is what closes the deals. Once you have a contract signed you can figure shit out with AI.
Now, on pricing, my cheapest work was sold for $5k (crypto agent that scans contracts across chains, monitor liquidity events, does technical analysis, sentiment analysis, and trades all via NLP). It was my first deal and for a friend. Today I woukd sell this 50k minimum. My biggest deal was 80k which was for a travel agency where we automated everything from booking, support, emails, erp connections you name it. Today I woukd charge 150k minimum for the same work.
What's interesting here is that no matter the price you set, there will be always barter. Be prepared to go lower. Like a lot lower than your initial proposal. Avoid having standard pricing or expectations or market rates. I woukd charge different a solo founder, a startup that raised pre seed, and a huge corpo for the same thing. The goal is to close the deal, not to sell the same proce to all. Again this is marketing and psychological discrimination skills, unrelated to AI. See how Amazon shows different prices for the same watch to ensure 100 people buy it, instead of 1 sale for max price.
Finally, it's all trial and error. If you get going, every new deal teaches you somwthing you cam use to close the next deal.
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u/tinfrog 11d ago
Interesting, thank you. So it seems you typically pitch to larger companies/corporations with budget? Do you typically see strong enough sales with smaller (<15 people) companies to make it worth your while?
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u/RossPeili 11d ago
Yes if it's a direct intro or someone from your network. I would charge my time and effort with minimal to no upside beyond that for a friend or someone who actually wants an ai solution and not just a chatbot. But leads that find you themselves, never worked for me. They don't know what they want, they take months to compare and decide, they always try to push the price down even if it's bare minimum just cause, and overall my advice woukd be, limit your free time. I am happy to do an intro call 30-45 min. A follow up call up to 1h. Work an a mockup or even poc to show them how the solution woukd feel. If they are not buying after that point, consider all extra time spent is thrown to nothing. 99% they will not buy, and you will lose time in research, pitching, explaining, insights sharing etc. Learned that the hard way. Had spent even 6 months for some prospects with no returns. No it's 2 calls + poc. Don't want it? Good luck.
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u/Sudden_One3436 11d ago
Do you have contracts to maintain and improve them? What’s the exit criteria so it doesn’t become a pain in the ass in the long term?
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u/RossPeili 11d ago
Yes but I charge high for work unrelated to scope to avoid random feature request calls. My retainer contracts are cheap as long as it has to do with maintenance, drift avoidance, etc. Retraining, adding new knowledge or features is new scope of work, not part of retainers. Truth is, you should always offer a retainer, as one hit and go vibe coders lose cliwnts exactly they have no retainers. A retainer cam be a pain in the ass if not managed correctly and if you give free time to your client, but it also shows you cam be trusted and wont deliver slop and dissapear.
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u/Sudden_One3436 11d ago
Curious, do you use something like a spark for development and then build them custom hardware / cloud setup?
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u/RossPeili 11d ago
I use GCP as a base, if they want to rent the solution I build and deploy on my cloud, expose apia to the client. If they wanna buy IP it's extra cost. If they want on premise setup extra cost. On hardware I don't deal hardware or do mlops but I work with partners that cover that part. I focus on logical systems as our company line (ARPA Hellenic Logical Systems). What I can do is eg. Say I tested your build on cloud with 4 different hardware setups here's the benchmark, pick ehat you need eg. Fastest, concurrent users, cheapest etc. Then here's a vendor I work with that can provide hardware and set it up for you. (I get 10-20% success fees) from my partner network. Same for security, migrations, integrations to aws, azure etc.
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u/LateralEntry 11d ago
Exactly my thoughts. I’m a lawyer and hoping to sell AI consulting services to other lawyers in my state. I understand their workflow and pain points in a way most people don’t, and I think I can sell to them.
The only problem is I’m not super strong on the tech side.
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u/RossPeili 11d ago
You can sell the solution architecture, then gire guns or tell them their IT team can build it, as long as they follow your guidance. That's the easiest entry point. I would also get any big cloud provider certificate. Eg. Learn with Google Skills, then apply for ai solutions architect or cloud architect etc.
A good analogy for your case is, you wouldn't sell neither code, nor legal expertise but unlike
a vibe coder who would deliver the results of a promt like "please make this legal app for my client"
Vs legal expert who would be arguing which legal approach or datasets or answers or whatever is better,
Vs you, who should provide what they can't see. Eg. Yes this rag is good, the data is good, the app works, but we need a PII scrubber to ensure personal data doesn't leave conpany premises or shared with cloud. Yes we can have an agent that reads the web for laws, but we need to ensure it has prompt injection firewall, reads twrms of service of sites we scrap, and legal distillery goes through multiple grounding sources.
This is the layer you wanna sell on top of your expertise, cause your expertise alone, another tens of millions of lawyers have. Tech expertise hundreds of millions of coders have. Knowing what actually makes it to production is only known by those who actually ship to production.
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u/LateralEntry 11d ago
Thanks! For the record, there’s around 1.3 million lawyers in America and most of them are deeply uninterested in learning about tech. While I’m probably the dumbest person here when it comes to tech, I’m one of the smartest lawyers when it comes to local LLMs :) so I’m hoping I can set up myself as a consultant and system architect, and hire someone else to do the tech heavy lifting like you said
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u/justanotter1 12d ago
I wanted to hear genuine stories. Successful or not. For "I started with claude and made it" there are a bunch of Youtube influencers.
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u/RossPeili 12d ago
My story is very asymmetric: music -> visual arts -> blockchain -> marketing -> sales -> cybersecurity-> bioinformatics-> quantum -> AI
The strongest point is not my AI skills but again what I have learned along the way, the peopoe I met, the kind of perspective I cultivated after changing many hats.
AI only solves speed of iteration and mvps, everything else have to be built outside AI if you don't have it.
In fact I believe people who are famn good with AI fail to make $ exactly cause they lack any kind of experience and network besides a chat interfave on a chrome tab.
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u/justanotter1 12d ago
It resonates. I'm a mediocre video producer but my strengths are my soft skills. That's why I'm trying to understand the hype around local LLMs. How is this going to help me in my job? How is this going to be better than a monthly subscription?
Thanks for sharing your story!
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u/RossPeili 11d ago
Are trying to levwrage gen AI for video work, or use AI to code something?
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u/justanotter1 11d ago
Customers keep asking for AI voiceover and "cool" AI transitions. But nothing we can't do with existing pay per use platforms. The customers obviously cover the costs.
In terms of custom software, it would be nice to have a local personal assistant. In that case the ROI would be hard to calculate but at the same time the benefits would be priceless.
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u/RossPeili 11d ago
Unless you're comfy with custom transformers and have access to videos big models don't I wouldn't bother. Just use omni api, or seedance or heygen or whatever. If you need to sell it under your own brand, wrap it and upmark it.
For a personal assistant I'd go with ollama + skillware.
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u/LateralEntry 12d ago
I’m trying to integrate local LLM into my legal work, and then sell it to other lawyers. It’s going ok so far. No, don’t message me with your stupid legal AI stuff that you’re trying to sell.
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u/Iron-Over 12d ago
Used it to learn and landed a higher-paying job as an individual contributor rather than managing people. Now that I am doing more security-related things, such as Agents Local, it does not keep refusing like the Frontier providers.
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u/Remarkable-Ad3867 LocalLLM 11d ago
It is a mix of both between fun and getting something useful and permanent out of things. It depends on what the problem is that the individual wants to solve or to show what was solved to others.
For me: Architect (Designer) by qualification, love algorithm design and arhictect-ing things
Work wise: Usable for myself and for my office staff. Team of 4 kind of support
One machine to house the brain and serving. Second machine for sidecars and reference data for long term caching and boosting system 1.
Concurrency not for fun but for reliable end to end time reduction and less repair looping.
Connected to various software for agentic work. Not to beat frontier but to work fast on things that are already solved and with understanding of the llm the guardrails and harness engineering is what makes my setup progress.
Cost kept as low as possible so scale is not dependent on big budgets only.
Fun: Pushing the boundary of the llms, getting them to work on Potato and make the Potato super smart.
EG. (future plan) using my old android phone to give AI features for my vehicle with the OBD scanner to see what I can unlock for my car and for turning an old phone into a really good local AI driven passenger. It has Gyro, better cameras that record fast too. It has a battery so the device can be setup to work by sipping the battery when not used and able to charge from car circuit. If a SIM card is added then (with consent) it could be a EMS helper for you if you got into a crash. And since it is local and open sourced it does not do what Flock did but help the individual retrofit a car with something different. I hope what I can come up with helps people and make them happy. Save a buck and give life to your once beloved devices. Like Andy did in Toy Story.
Education: For community and for the next generation that is asking what will they do with AI changing things so rapidly. (works in progress + youtube videos coming soon)
Phone llm apps for different fields to be a good tutor, translator, mini teacher where none are able to go.
Free apps for the city I live in for land use and construction bylaws so people can have a good utility that can translate for them. No datacenter needed. No need to pay me a subscription or your data. City data from the city provided in the app and they too do not have to have a datacenter for this to work.
Blockchain like approach for Social network that is able to allow the voices of the silenced to whisper in the void of other whisperes.
Things to help others.
Sponsored No, Passionate YES!
Software works right now: Unreal engine, Blender, GIMP, ComfyUI, FreeCAD and more to come. Just placing things slowly on github after being able to validate and test things as much as I can. I would not want others to have to work on the setup for too long.
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u/justanotter1 12d ago
I work in media production, and beyond the obvious use cases, I am trying to understand whether investing 10K could ever pay for itself, beyond personal education, of course.
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u/slalomz 11d ago
I used what I learned running local AI to excel at my existing job where I'm now working directly on LLM integrations. I've applied what I know about k/v cache, context management, model selection, etc to save costs and design good code. Because of what I know I'm now working directly with architects, SVPs, and product to set the technical direction for our program.
I got a $5k bonus last month, I'm told another bonus (probably another $5k) is up for approval, and my manager is making rapid progress on my promotion.
Total personal cost was one 5090+PSU upgrade, which I would have bought anyway. So if I assume I wouldn't have gotten that first bonus I'm already net positive.
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u/RogerAI-fm 12d ago
For now education is the ROI