If you have a relatively recent GPU (particularly Nvidia) or a Macbook Pro M1/2/3/4, you can run a decent LLM locally with software like llama.cpp, a mozilla llamafile, ollama, lm-studio (non-foss) or jan[.]ai.
If you don’t, you are in the same boat as me, the models you can run locally are limited, to the smaller more basic models at slower speesd on CPU/ram only, but it is still possible.
The r/localllama community on reddit is helpful for learning what is possibly and practical. Huggingface is a good community to be aware of also.