Three-year TCO for a self-hosted LLM stack vs API spend
API pricing is per-token and scales linearly. On-prem cost is mostly fixed plus operational overhead. The honest TCO at three usage tiers, with hidden costs disclosed.
Cost of ownership
Cost of ownership
TCO models, build-vs-buy math, hidden costs of API-only architectures.
Hidden costs of running OpenAI at production scale
List-price API math misses about a third of what production usage actually costs. Here are the line items we surface during cost audits.