Every prompt you send to a hosted LLM leaves your network. That includes the text you type, the files you attach, and whatever context your tools decide to pack around it. For a quick question about a regex that doesn’t matter. For your mailbox, your customers’ tickets or your company wiki, it matters a lot.

That is the main reason I run most of my models on my own hardware with Ollama. This post covers why, and where these models are useful in a self-hosted setup.