A 30-day blind test: 800 meta titles + 800 product descriptions rewritten by both Qwen 2.5 14B (self-hosted on a refurbished workstation) and Claude Sonnet 4, rated by 3 SEO contractors. The result is not a clean win for open weights — it's a split. Where Qwen breaks even, where it collapses, and the actual cost math behind self-hosting for repeat-pattern SEO work.
Self-hosting a 70B model sounds reckless for a marketing team. For 90% of teams it is. But there are 4 specific jobs — bulk ticket classification, private competitive intel, overnight SEO meta-generation, PII-redacted list cleaning — where the math flips and a single A100 + Ollama pays for itself in 4-7 months. Hardware reality, Docker compose, real throughput, and the 4 prompts.
