LLMs

LLM Diet Recipes! Reducing LLM Costs!

We Kick Up-Selling LLM Services to the Curb and Look at Other Options. You can do a LOT for free.

thinkmelt@protonmail.com

Mar 30, 2026 • 7 min read

We Put Our LLM's on a Diet. Free sites made this image https://www.canva.com/ai-image-generator/

This site uses Grok 4 extensively to research and write articles. We paid for a 'all-you-can-llm' subscription, only to find out:

You are allowed about 20 questions per 2 hours, well no, actually...
They changed their model yesterday (for my account - your mileage may vary) and allowed about 40 questions per day.. it shut off for 17 hours.. Come back tomorrow.

Wait a second!? That was about a 6 fold reduction in service but for only $200/month you can 'fix it' by getting Grok Heavy. So I am having my original service effectively killed, dramatically truncated, but if I 'step-up' to the $200/month option I can basically get back what I have now... This is a giant bait-n-switch terms of service, and it becomes a principle issue that if they can do it once - they will do it again, they will do it until you run out of money. You have to stop right there. You are rewarding effectively fraud at that point. And there is nothing you can do effectively - because you didn't buy anything because the service in the fine print made sure to carefully accomodate it. Then they turn off customer service entirely. Don't believe me - try to find a human left at the company. If that is not enough they involuntarily retained credit card information because 'I had a service' So I had to completely KILL all accounts and the remaining time on my subscription just to get the credit card removed. That's garbage. No Thanks.

Everybody needs to Resist This Stuff

We 'care' about the environment till you find out manufacturers everywhere carefully engineer 'up-selling' and 'opt-in' programs and will spend millions to keep you on their treadmill of billing..

Some examples..

Ink Cartridge Reset Programmers

Companies abhorred the thought of consumers refilling their own cartridges with a syringe so they engineered piezo-jet counters so that you cannot refill them. The counter would allow so many ejections, then disable the cartridge. It would force you to buy a new set of ink cartridges which were always price-point set at about $10 less than just replacing the entire printer. Cartridge reset programmers allow you to reset the counters and sell commonly on ebay:

Eight Vehicles with Sealed Transmissions That are Hard To Service

By doing this and via careful engineering when you are told 'It will last the life of the car' what they really meant to say was 'It is engineered to last the life of the warranty. Then we want it to kaput and we want to sell you a new one..'

Just wait till encrypted CAN-BUS headlights that make an encrypted handshake to your cars headlight completely stop you from buying a generic part. How else will they get you to the $5000 headlight replacement. Yes it is coming.

Encrypted Controller Chips on Laptop Batteries

This goes back to 2012 even. All kinds of companies jumped in creating 'encrypted handshake protocols' between the laptop battery and the laptop. It just mean't that no third party could manufacture a competitive device. Entire companies sprouted up selling 'laptop battery re-setters' - just like ink cartridges!

The point being is that in every case companies fought viciously for control of your product choices. However right now LLM's are the 'wild west' and you have lots of alternative options.

So now that 'consumer corralling' is starting to seep into LLM's, its time to resist this 'opt-in' as much as we can.

BASIC LLM (FREE) Search Engines Offer Lots of Basic LLM Services For Free.

Yes the token context is quite short - but we actually were able to get them to write basic software, and ask detailed questions. Completely free.

Duck.ai

2. Google.com

MEDIUM LLMS (Free)

Next up we show there are some actual decent free LLMs, at the time of writing we show that you can run a 30b Nemotron from Nvidia - completely free.

Select Chat / Add LLM / Filter on Free.

It should be noticed that you can also access a larger 80b model for free:

Yes these can come an go, but mostly you can get a lot done without having to pay anything at all!

MEDIUM-LARGE LLMS (Free)

By using LLM-Studio you can run a large selection of LLM's if you have the compute ability, here is a full guide for your benefit. However it can require more hardware costs.

Typically though you might need to look at a cost of $1000 US for a good graphics card at a minimum it would be recommended a 8-12GB GPU.

The Rise of TurboQuant

This is a game changer - as it offered 6x size compression in a LLM. That meant that a end-user with minimal hardware could now easily access the larger LLM models - that can get work done! It has been experienced that at the 72b mark you get significantly powerful LLM's- that can do work for you every day.

Here are Five LLM's that directly mention TurboQuant

Here are Hugging Face model pages that explicitly mention or use TurboQuant:

If you want the single best page to start with, use the first link (flovflo/turboquant-mlx-qwen35-kv).

Recursive Researcher LLM's are Costly.

It should be noted that if your LLM does recursive research for you, it may run dozens of token cycles. So even if it's only '35 cents / 1M tokens' that will add up very quickly when your LLM goes off and repeatedly researches things to get you the best answer. So it helps to know this for those of you still subscribing.

Conclusion.

Do you need to do 40 days work in two hours? Some yes, we applaude those who do. We have heared that Claude Code can even accelerate this more. In the end programmers are assuming $2000/month bills to spit out entire applications - in hours. Which is great, but are they actually going to make any money on what they created..? They find out that it can take years of application building and developing, offering products for free before they ever step into a role of income. Then they realize everybody was in a race to the bottom, that software effectively is just a loss-leader, so why invest millions creating software that everyone is going to expect for free like a youtube video? I'll let you decide. But in my opinion if you can be really LLM productive, get a lot done, not get trapped into high subscription models and high-stress streams of pressured up-selling - that is the path.

I probably will not being renewing my Grok. Good riddance...