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How to run a bigger model without a local GPU

Short answer: Connect Ollama Cloud: your ollama.com subscription’s hosted models, run on Ollama’s own servers and proxied through Build Perch. It’s a flat-rate way to use large open-weight models (gpt-oss, DeepSeek, Qwen, and others) without a GPU capable of holding them locally.

Steps

  1. Create an API key at ollama.com/settings/keys.
  2. In Build Perch, open the Integrations window and select Ollama Cloud under LLM Providers.
  3. Paste the key into the Ollama Cloud row and save. Once saved, the key is never displayed again: it’s stored securely on your machine and used only to authenticate your requests to ollama.com.
  4. Open the model picker and switch the provider dropdown to Ollama (Cloud).
  5. Pick a model from the list (the Size column shows each model’s approximate parameter count), then click Connect.

Notes & gotchas

  • Billed by your ollama.com plan (Free/Pro/Max), not per token; the model picker shows “Subscription” instead of a $/token rate.
  • Size is the practical cost signal on a subscription: lighter models (roughly 32B and under) are likelier to run on a free plan, and the heaviest (hundreds of billions of parameters and up) may need a paid one.
  • It’s a separate provider and credential from local Ollama: connecting one doesn’t touch the other, and you can run both side by side in the same workspace.
  • Ollama Cloud serves chat models only, so it hosts no media models. An Ollama Cloud chat can still generate images, speech, music, and video if you also have an OpenRouter API key configured: those requests route to OpenRouter while the conversation stays on your Ollama Cloud model.
  • If you already have a capable local GPU, running the same class of model through local Ollama instead costs nothing per message. Ollama Cloud is for when your hardware can’t hold the model you want, not a general replacement for it.