LLM Cost Estimator:
Build In-House vs. Use APIs
Dial in your volume and get a side-by-side monthly cost estimate. No fluff — just numbers to help you make the call.
Prices last updated May 2026 · providers reprice 2–4× per year · edit any price below if you have newer rates
Assumptions: Token estimates are per-user-per-day baselines (chat = 1×, docs = 3×, agents = 6×, pipeline = 4×). R&D mode applies a 0.2× multiplier. API prices are list rates as of May 2026 — enterprise agreements are typically 15–30% cheaper at $10K+/month commit. Engineering costs are excluded (assumed equal on both sides). Self-host costs are GPU infra only (no ops or licensing overhead). Click ⓘ next to any model to verify current pricing.
Who's using this?
What kind of AI task?
What stage are you at?
API options
Self-host Llama on GPU (fixed monthly infra cost)
break-even analysis
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× your current volume
recommendation
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Beyond cost: when each option wins
API wins when...
Low or variable volume — you only pay for what you use, no idle GPU cost
You want frontier models — GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Gemini Pro are months ahead of open-source
Speed to market — no infra to set up, swap models in an afternoon
No MLOps team — model serving, scaling, and updates handled by the provider
Burst traffic — APIs scale instantly, GPU clusters don't
Enterprise pricing — at $10K+/month, providers offer 15–30% discounts on commit
Self-hosting wins when...
High, predictable volume — fixed GPU cost beats variable API cost at scale
Data privacy / compliance — HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR: tokens never leave your infra
Fine-tuning needed — full control to fine-tune, quantize, and update on your schedule
Latency SLAs — dedicated GPU = consistent, low latency; APIs have shared-resource variance
Cost predictability — fixed monthly bill regardless of usage spikes
Vendor lock-in concerns — stay portable, switch models without API migration
real-world examples
personal
Portfolio site with AI chat
~5 visitors/day · 3–5 questions each
A personal site with an AI assistant gets maybe 20–30 queries a day. That's roughly 40K tokens — less than $0.01 a day on GPT-4o mini. Essentially free.
Use an API. Don't even think about self-hosting.
team
Internal knowledge base
~50 employees · 10 questions/day each
A RAG-based internal tool for a 50-person team runs around 5M tokens/day. That's $150–400/month depending on the model. No reason to self-host at this scale.
API. Revisit only if the bill grows past $2K/month.
scale-up
B2B SaaS AI feature
~5,000 active users · 5 queries/day
A mid-size SaaS product might run 50–100M tokens/month. API costs land around $2,000–8,000/month. You're probably still better off on APIs unless you have an ML team ready to own infra.
API for now. Start benchmarking self-host options.
enterprise
Consumer app at scale
1M+ users · daily active queries
At this scale, API costs can hit $100K+ per month. Self-hosting a cluster of H100s costs $15–20K/month and pays for itself quickly. Data privacy and latency control become real advantages too.
Self-hosting starts making sense. Budget for MLOps.