All professional developers want two things: Do their work as fast as possible and spend as little budget to make things work. That's the core operating principle of most companies.

What's changing is that managed solutions are becoming increasingly easier to set up and increasingly cheaper on smaller scales.

While I do personally enjoy understanding the entire stack, I can't justify self-hosting and managing an LLM until we run so many prompts a day that it becomes cheaper for us to run our own GPUs compared to just running APIs like OpenAI/Anthropic/Deepseek/...