The Real Cost of Self-Hosting a 70B Model

By C.W. Jameson · Published 10 March 2026 · Last reviewed 10 March 2026

At 5 million tokens per day, self-hosting wins. Below 1 million, it is almost always cheaper to use the API. Here is the full calculation.

Full-stack cost analysis: GPU rental, engineering time, maintenance, and when self-hosting beats API pricing.