By Yadullah Abidi
Publication Date: 2026-01-27 21:00:00
I’ve been paying $20 monthly for Perplexity AI Pro for nearly a year now. It felt justified considering I get real-time web search, cited sources, and a polished web interface, which makes research effortless. But considering there are apps that let anyone enjoy the benefits of a local LLM, I found that I could replace my Perplexity with a local LLM for a majority of my tasks.
This isn’t a blanket rejection of cloud services. Perplexity still excels at real-time web search and synthesizing multiple sources instantly. But when I examined my daily tasks—code review, documentation writing, data analysis, technical troubleshooting—my local setup delivers faster, more private, and increasingly capable results without asking a dime in return.
My local LLM setup and why I built it
The stack that replaced Perplexity on my machine
My journey down the local LLM rabbit hole started with Ollama. It’s an open-source tool that has become the standard for running LLMs locally. Windows installation barely takes a few minutes as well. I then paired it with LM Studio as my GUI frontend, although you can use it as a standalone AI app as well. There are plenty of other apps you can use to enjoy the benefits of local AI, so take your pick.
My hardware isn’t top of the line either. I’m using a laptop with an 8 GB RTX 4060, 16GB LPDDR5X memory, and an Intel…
