Explore flexible AI-coding workflows without vendor lock-in. This hands-on deep-dive weighs options such as bargain GPU clouds – Runpod, TensorDock, Kaggle T4s, and Paperspace – and then illustrates our experiment in self-hosting a Qwen 2.5 Coder on a single RTX 4080. We lay out where dollars, VRAM, and latency stack up, touch on how quantization…