Run a language model yourself, or rent it by the request?
In short: self-hosting pays off from a regular usage volume upward, because cost then decouples from the number of requests. Where exactly that point sits depends on your figures, and the cost-comparison calculator quantifies the precise break-even for your case.
Self-hosted against pay-per-request, side by side
| Dimension | Self-hosted | Pay-per-request |
|---|---|---|
| Cost predictability | Fixed operating cost regardless of volume, once running. | Scales with every request, hard to forecast at growing usage. |
| Data residency | Data stays inside your network or a zone you name. | Data is sent to the provider's infrastructure with each call. |
| Latency | Local inference, no round trip to an external endpoint. | Depends on the provider's network and current load. |
| Model choice | Any open-weight model, swapped or fine-tuned as needed. | Limited to the provider's current lineup and terms. |
| Operational overhead | You own monitoring and maintenance, or hand it to us. | The provider operates it, you accept their terms of use. |
A worked example
A company processing 250,000 requests a month at roughly 1,800 tokens each pays a pay-per-request bill that scales linearly with that volume, month after month, with no ceiling. The same workload run on owned infrastructure carries a fixed monthly cost for hardware, power and a share of operating staff, independent of how many requests are actually made. At this volume the fixed cost is lower than the metered one within the first year, and the gap widens as usage grows. Below a certain volume, the relationship reverses and pay-per-request is cheaper, which is exactly why the answer depends on your own figures rather than a general rule.
Own operation against billing per request
Your figures, our disclosed assumptions, result immediately on screen.
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What self-hosting looks like in practice, what you get and how it runs.
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