I Replaced $240/Year of AI Coding Tools with a 100% Local Stack — Here Is What Happened
Last month I cancelled my GitHub Copilot subscription. $10/month. $120/year. Over two years that's a decent mechanical keyboard.
I replaced it with three free, open-source tools. My laptop has 16GB RAM and no dedicated GPU. Here is exactly what happened after 30 days.
The Stack
| Tool | Role | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Continue.dev | VS Code/JetBrains AI assistant | $0 |
| Ollama | Local LLM runtime | $0 |
| Tabby | Self-hosted code completion | $0 |
| DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite | 16B parameter coding model | $0 |
Total setup time: 22 minutes. Total monthly cost: $0.00.
The Numbers After 30 Days
| Metric | Copilot ($10/mo) | Local Stack ($0) |
|---|---|---|
| Acceptance rate | 28% | 23% |
| Latency | 180ms | 340ms |
| Offline work | No | Yes |
| Code privacy | Cloud | 100% local |
| Custom models | Locked | Any Ollama model |
The local stack is slower. I won't pretend otherwise. But 340ms is still faster than I can type the full line. And when my train Wi-Fi drops, Copilot becomes a very expensive text editor.
The Setup (Copy-Paste)
# 1. Install Ollama
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
# 2. Pull the coding model
ollama pull deepseek-coder-v2:16b
# 3. Install Continue.dev extension
# VS Code: search "Continue" in marketplace
# Set config.json to point at http://localhost:11434
Tabby runs as a Docker container on the same machine. It indexes your codebase and gives project-aware completions.
Where It Fell Short
- Large refactors: Copilot's bigger context window wins for cross-file changes.
- Chat quality: DeepSeek-Coder is good, but not Claude-level for architectural questions.
- Battery drain: Local inference eats ~15% more battery. I plug in during heavy coding sessions.
The Verdict
For 80% of my daily work — completions, docstrings, unit tests, boilerplate — the local stack is good enough. For the other 20%, I use MonkeyCode. It's free, open-source, and handles the complex agent tasks the local models can't: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF
Would you trade 160ms of latency for $240/year and total privacy? Or is cloud convenience worth the subscription?
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