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self-hosting LLM cost

Appears in 4 articles·Latest Oct 21, 2026
An architectural diagram comparing a lattice of model-parameter blocks and a stacked column of GPU units against a single slender API endpoint node, illustrating the infrastructure cost of self-hosting an open-weight AI model versus calling a hosted API.

Open Source AI vs API: What Self-Hosting Actually Costs

DeepSeek beats GPT-6 Astra 35x to 150x per token, but renting GPUs to self-host isn't automatically cheaper. Here's the real break-even number.

cost of open source AI vs APIDeepSeek V4.1 Flash pricingGPT-6 Astra API cost