Is anyone actually surprised by this?
Sorry but you are just talking assumptions without even having looked at the facts.
Its not cheap, but basically a single toptier gaming desktop with an additional graphics card (or 2) is literally all you need.
I know multiple people who work normal IT jobs that have already started on setting up their own. They plan on running them for their whole family, many users at a time from the same machine.
Here is someone who got it to work on a cluster of mac-minis. Again not cheap, but clearly within dedicated consumer enthusiast reach. https://digialps.com/deepseek-v3-on-m4-mac-blazing-fast-inference-on-apple-silicon/
And this is before even considering how fast open source moves, i am expecting quantized models which can have double speed for negligible quality impact any second now.
