Cost check
What does it cost?
Three honest ways to run the same model: pay per token for the full-precision API, or run its quantized weights on a machine you own or rent by the hour. Pick your usage and hardware — every number below decomposes into a measured price, a sourced vendor figure, or an assumption you can change.
Cheapest at your settings: Cloud API
Money only — the paths differ in speed, privacy and, for quantized weights, output quality.Cloud API — Cheapest at your settings
per day
$0.597
per week
$4.18
per month
$18.16
per year
$218
$0.420 in / $3.00 out per 1M tokens
Your machine
◇ Estimated— Estimated: computed from our curated model and hardware catalog — not a live reading.per day
$2.01
per week
$14.07
per month
$61.15
per year
$734
$1.46 hardware + $0.550 electricity per day — runs the Q4_K_M quantized weights
Rented GPU
per day
$1.60
per week
$11.22
per month
$48.76
per year
$585
RTX 4090 at $0.401/h — cheapest measured class that fits the Q4_K_M weights
Every assumption on the table
- + Usage: 500,000 tokens per day, of which 70% input tokens — an order-of-magnitude anchor, not a measurement.
- + Active compute: 4 hours per day, used for electricity and rental time alike.
- + Power draw: 450 W board power (vendor spec) plus 100 W for the rest of the machine, while active.
- + Hardware spread over 3 years, straight-line; resale value ignored.
- + All figures are USD. API and rental prices are the same worldwide; hardware list prices are US figures excluding sales tax (EU retail prices include VAT and differ), and electricity varies a lot by country — edit both fields to your local numbers.
- + A month is 365/12 ≈ 30.4 days, so twelve months equal one year.
- + API and rental prices are collected automatically and carry their collection time; hardware prices are vendor list prices (launch MSRP or current official price, as noted next to the field) you can override.
- + The three paths differ in speed, privacy and — for quantized local weights — output quality. This table compares money only.
What this is not
Not a quote and not advice: prices move, electricity varies, and your real token volume is yours to judge. Each column shows where its numbers come from — check them against the live sources before spending money.