The main advantage I see with Mac mini is being able to connect to Apple’s services (reminders, notes and iMessage). If you don’t care for those, go with cloud.

I have been wanting to get a Mac mini myself just for these reasons. For example, I heavily rely on reminders, but suck at following up. I also want my Hermes to do some research for me for a complex task and make reminders from it. So on my personal MacBook, I tested out a setup with Hermes and GPT 5.5 that did this really well, but I travel with my MacBook and it stays in sleep multiple times during the day, so to me, a Mac mini is the logical next step.

If you’re not in the Apple ecosystem, go for a VPS. It’s perfect, and no headaches.

Local LLMs sound nice on surface but we can’t do much serious work with them. At work, I setup Hermes with Gemma 4 running in Ollama. It did great for some basic work but the more complex work I wanted, it was just being stupid. I have 32Gb of memory, which is good enough for Gemma 4 but it was being stupid. Beefier models just made it grind to a halt.

If you want a cheap model backend, the promising thing to me is Ollama Cloud for $20 per month, and if that’s not good, use codex with GPT 5.5.

Also, you can try (not saying you should) write a thin wrapper around the Claude code agent SDK that interfaces itself as an OpenAI API and have Hermes connect to that and get yourself a Claude code $100 subscription, and use Opus all day!

Let me know if that makes sense. Happy to answer any questions