LLM API Cost Calculator: Self-Hosted vs OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Together AI

LLM API Cost Calculator: Self-Hosted vs OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Together AI

Running your own LLM costs about $0.0003 per 1K tokens on consumer hardware. OpenAI GPT-4o costs $5 per 1M output tokens. At what usage level does self-hosting pay off? The math is straightforward.

API Cost Comparison (per 1M output tokens)

Provider/Model$/1M tokensQuality tier
OpenAI GPT-4o$15.00Frontier
Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet$15.00Frontier
OpenAI GPT-4o mini$0.60Mid
Together AI (Llama 3.3 70B)$0.88High open-source
Groq (Llama 3.1 8B)$0.06Fast/mid
Self-hosted RTX 4090 (Llama 3 8B)~$0.03*Mid open-source
Self-hosted RTX 4090 (70B Q4)~$0.12*High open-source

*Self-hosted costs assume RTX 4090 at $0.12/kWh electricity, 24/7 availability.

Break-Even Calculator

RTX 4090 hardware cost: ~$1,600. Monthly electricity: ~$18 (500W × 24h × 30d × $0.05/idle + inference). Monthly fixed cost: ~$40 amortized over 3 years.

Break-even vs GPT-4o mini ($0.60/1M): at 67M tokens/month. That's about 67 million output tokens — achievable for power users or small teams.

Break-even vs Together AI 70B ($0.88/1M): at 100M tokens/month with a comparable open-source model. More demanding, but teams processing documents, emails, or code at scale cross this threshold.

For hardware ROI guidance by use case, see LLMHardware.io's cost calculator.

Hidden Costs of Self-Hosting

  • Setup time: 2–8 hours for initial configuration
  • Maintenance: model updates, software updates, occasional debugging
  • Reliability: no SLA; hardware failures mean downtime
  • No frontier models: self-hosted peaks at ~GPT-4o mini quality for 7B, GPT-4o for 70B+

For production applications requiring reliability and the absolute latest models, cloud APIs remain worth the cost. For high-volume, privacy-sensitive, or latency-critical workloads, self-hosting wins clearly.

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