[tomck]

I have tried a model on my laptop+GPU before, and it is incredibly unusable. Incredibly slow and just bad output for exactly the work you describe

If you're looking for a cheap practical tool + don't care if it's not local, deepseek's non-reasoning model via openrouter is the most cost efficient by far for the work you describe.

I put 10 dollars in my account about 6 months ago and still haven't gotten through it, after heavy use semi regularly.