Sure if you aren't tech savvy you can always just pay for the ease of use but if you don't mind figuring things out to do it for free then you should still be allowed to do that.
(Btw you don't need particularly beefy computers to run LLMs especially llamacpp.. it can run on your phone if you have 6-8gb memory.)
I work with the public somewhat often in my career. I once had to walk a person through the complicated job of... entering coordinates correctly... four times. They could not understand that they had to convert their hours minutes seconds form of coordinates to decimals despite me telling them that three times. I was barely keeping my cool the third time he entered coordinates wrong. People are dumb, and then they expect you to clean up after their dumb mistakes.
I would never want to imagine the hell that would be unleashed trying to offer people a "free" version of a product that would require setting up an LLM on their machine. I know you might say something to the effect of "But that isn't on the devs if someone doesn't know how to do it", but people will still blame them for not supporting them enough. Not to mention that, unless all locally run LLMs have a specific protocol for integration, then I would imagine it would be a bunch of work. Because once you make the move from supporting one and only one method, to supporting multiple methods, people will continue to push for more and more to be added. I totally get why they wouldn't want to do all that.
