My setup is WSL2 on a regular Windows machine — no GPU, so local inference would be painfully slow Gemini 2.5 Flash free tier is genuinely good enough — 1,500 req/day, I use ~105. Quality is solid for content generation and analysis tasks $0/month is hard to beat — I did accidentally rack up $127 when I used a billing-enabled API key (wrote a blog post about that lesson), but with free tier properly configured, it's been zero cost for months If I needed more throughput or privacy-sensitive processing, I'd consider local models. But for my current scale, free tier Gemini handles everything.