Frontier or local?
Stop guessing with your AI budget.
A 31-page buyer's guide that answers exactly one question: where should your next AI dollar actually go. Real prices pulled from vendor documentation, a verdict you can act on today, and not one page pitching a specific model.
Five ways AI spending quietly gets out of hand
Pulled straight from the guide's "Ugly Truths" pages. None of this means don't use AI. It means don't guess.
A runaway agent loop has no off switch. There's no "are you sure?" prompt. Just an invoice, a week later.
The standard vendor deprecation window. A model you built workflows around can vanish on a timer.
Claude Haiku's 2025 price hike, $0.25 to $0.80 per million input tokens. The price you sign up at is never the price you keep.
Not opt-in. Free and consumer tiers train on your input by default. Most people never find the toggle.
What API pricing actually costs once you wire it into a real workflow, versus the $20/month plan you tried it on.
Every one of those is survivable if you saw it coming. The guide's whole job is to make sure you do. Page 16 has the five questions that replace the guessing. Try a short version below.
Answer five questions.
Get your verdict.
A short version of the decision matrix on page 16, the one that tells you whether to pay for frontier, build a hybrid stack, or go local-first.
Reasoning goes here.
That's one page of twenty-five. The book has this same rigor for pricing, hardware, and a 12-month cost breakdown, not just a verdict.
Everything the verdict is built on
Same team.
Same workload.
Three different bills.
12-month total cost of ownership for a 5-person team running a moderate AI workload, about 50 million tokens a month. This is the median case from page 20.
Year 1, hybrid wins because it avoids the local admin cliff. Year 2, local-only catches up fast once the hardware is paid off ($8,640 total). Page 20 has the full multi-year table and the break-even math. Page 21 gives you a blank calculator for your own numbers.
"Frontier: someone else paid the training bill. You pay the inference bill."
Page 5a, What Is a Frontier Model?"The bill isn't the API. The bill is the orchestration."
Page 22, The One-Page Cheat Sheet"A fish is not a worse bird. It's the wrong animal for the sky."
Page 10, When Frontier Is the Right AnswerThe buyer, not the builder
- Freelancers and solopreneurs picking a first AI stack
- Small business owners evaluating AI tools for a small team
- Consultants building an AI-augmented service business
- Privacy-conscious buyers in legal, medical, financial, or journalism work
- Anyone tired of videos that pitch one side and ignore the other
You do not need:
Read one full page for free
Page 11, "What Is Local AI?", the actual production page from the guide. No teaser, no email required, no catch. The rest of the book picks up exactly where it leaves off.
Questions people actually have
I'm not technical. Will this make sense? +
Yes. It's written for the buyer, not the builder. Every term gets defined in plain language the first time it shows up, acronyms are spelled out, and every idea leans on a concrete analogy instead of jargon. No computer science degree required.
Isn't this all free on YouTube? +
Pieces of it, scattered across a hundred videos, each one pitching whichever vendor is paying for it. This puts the whole decision, sourced against vendor pricing pages, on 31 pages you read once instead of a weekend of conflicting takes.
Won't this be outdated in a month? +
AI pricing moves fast, that's exactly why the guide is built the way it is. The decision framework (the part that doesn't change) lives in the narrative pages. Specific model names and dollar figures are isolated to four reference-card pages, so a pricing refresh touches four pages, not the whole book. And when a refresh ships, every buyer gets it by email, free, for as long as b4Help keeps this guide updated. No repurchase, no upgrade fee.
I already pay for ChatGPT or Claude. Is this still useful? +
Probably more useful, not less. You'll know exactly which tier you're actually on, whether it's the right one for your workload, and where local AI should be quietly handling the cheap 80% instead.
What do I actually get? +
One PDF, 31 pages, delivered instantly after checkout. Print-friendly, no account, no app, no subscription.
What happens to my $49.99 if I want help applying it? +
It's credited in full toward the Tier 2 AI Readiness Audit or the Tier 3 Done-For-You Setup. Forward your receipt when you're ready and it comes off the price, so the guide is effectively free the moment you move up.
Everything you need to know
before you spend a dollar on AI.
31 pages. 30-minute read. $49.99, credited toward
a paid engagement if you go further.