I ran the same ad-copy brief through self-hosted Mistral Small 24B and GPT-4o, blind-rated by a marketer who'd never seen either output. Here's the full setup — Ollama for laptops, vLLM for a single 4090 server, the prompt template I use, and the per-token cost math that decided which one I kept on the production account.
A practical guide to setting up SmolLM 1.7B on your laptop with Ollama and using it to rewrite marketing content — zero API costs, full privacy, and surprisingly good quality for everyday copy work.
Use Claude to write a self-documenting SQL cohort retention query for Klaviyo or Shopify data, then read the M1, curve-flattening, and cohort-over-cohort trend signals yourself — no analyst required.
