AI subscriptions add up faster than you notice. I'm paying $236/month across seven AI tools — and every company I'm giving money to says they're losing money on me. The math only works because of VC subsidies that won't last. When the bill catches up, you'll wish you'd built your own stack. This playlist tracks what AI actually costs, why it's about to cost more, and what happens when you stop renting and start owning your compute. Topics covered: • What you're really paying every month (the subscription audit) • Why "$20/mo" turns into $200/mo (the enshittification cycle) • Self-hosting the AI tools you actually use • Replacing SaaS with a homelab — what works, what doesn't • When AI is genuinely cheaper than humans, and when it isn't If you've ever stared at a credit card statement wondering when "just one more subscription" became $100+/month, this playlist is for you.
Curated by: Codacus (15 videos)
I grew up on Dexter's Lab, Beyblade's Dizzi, and Iron Man's JARVIS — computers you could actually talk to. Forty years later, every "voice assistant" still lives in someone else's cloud, listens forever, and charges you a subscription. So I stopped waiting and built one myself. Runs entirely on my laptop. No cloud. No subscription. No data leaving the island. This video is the whole journey — why I started, what broke along the way, and what it finally took to make it feel alive. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱ CHAPTERS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 00:00 The dream (since I was 4) 01:30 Why cloud assistants suck 03:10 What I tried first (and why it failed) 05:20 The stack: Whisper + Ollama + Chatterbox 09:00 Making it interruptible 11:40 Tool calls — actually doing things 13:30 Live demo 16:00 The payoff: an island that's mine ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🛠 THE STACK ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ • Whisper (speech-to-text) • Ollama (local LLM) • Chatterbox TTS (voice cloning) • Tauri (desktop shell in Rust) • All running offline, on one laptop ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔗 LINKS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 👉 Dexter (the project in this video): https://github.com/thecodacus/dexter 📬 My newsletter (Neural Loop): https://neural-loop.beehiiv.com ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ If you're building your own local AI — drop a comment. I read all of them. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #LocalAI #VoiceAssistant #Ollama #Whisper #SelfHosted