Local vs cloud: when does your own hardware pay off?
Your hardware cost, your electricity, your usage — and an honest break-even, including “never”. Pair it with the feasibility checker to make sure the machine can actually run the model first.
Assumptions — edit to match yours
prefilled from MSRP when you pick hardware — enter what you'd actually pay
prefilled from TDP for GPUs; real draw is usually lower
time the machine spends actually producing tokens
check your utility bill
what you'd otherwise buy from an API
blended input+output — look up current prices, they change monthly
at your assumptions
- Cloud spend / month
- $40
- Local electricity / month
- $5.48
- Net savings / month
- $34.52
Hardware pays for itself in 29 months.
What this deliberately ignores: hardware resale value and depreciation, quality differences between the local model and the cloud model you'd actually use, your setup time, and idle power. It answers one question — token cost — with your numbers, not ours.
How this calculator works
- How is break-even computed?
- Monthly cloud spend (your tokens per month × the cloud price you enter) minus monthly local electricity (power draw × generation hours × your rate) is your net monthly savings; hardware cost divided by that is months to break even. The formula is published on our methodology page — there's nothing else in it.
- Why don't you prefill cloud prices?
- Because API prices change monthly and a stale prefilled number would quietly skew every result. We'd rather you paste today's price for the model you'd actually use than trust ours. Hardware cost and power draw do get prefilled — those come from sourced, dated spec rows.
- What does the calculator ignore?
- Resale value, depreciation, quality differences between local and cloud models, setup time, and idle power. It answers exactly one question: at your usage, when does buying hardware beat renting tokens. If the answer is 'never', we say never.