Qwen2.5 72B is a free, fully open-source large language model built by Alibaba that you can run on your own hardware. It competes directly with Claude and GPT-4-class models on reasoning, code generation, and math—areas where most open alternatives historically lag—while supporting 128,000 token contexts and multiple languages. The catch is computational: you'll need serious GPU investment (roughly $200k+ in hardware) to run it at scale, and like all LLMs, it has a knowledge cutoff and may need customization for niche domains. For organizations that can afford the infrastructure, it eliminates per-API-call costs entirely.