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Quick post about a change I made that's worked out well.

I was using OpenAI API for automations in n8n — email summaries, content drafts, that kind of thing. Was spending ~$40/month.

Switched everything to Ollama running locally. The migration was pretty straightforward since n8n just hits an HTTP endpoint. Changed the URL from api.openai.com to localhost:11434 and updated the request format.

For most tasks (summarization, classification, drafting) the local models are good enough. Complex reasoning is worse but I don't need that for automation workflows.

Hardware: i7 with 16GB RAM, running Llama 3 8B. Plenty fast for async tasks.

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[-] kambusha@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago

What's the model name to pull?

[-] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Qwen3.5 and Gemma4 are the best ones for tool calling that don’t need massive amounts of memory

[-] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Probably use Gemma4 if your machine has the chops for it.

[-] webkitten@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

You could probably get away with using gemma3:4b or phi3.5.

this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
78 points (77.5% liked)

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