Should You Self-Host LLM Inference? Cost and Risk Guide
Should You Self-Host Inference?The honest economics of running your own models, and the breakeven most teams get wrong.Paolo PerroneJul 18, 20261881ShareSelf-hosting inference pays off in two cases: you push past roughly two million tokens a day, or your data legally cannot leave your network. Below that line a hosted API is cheaper, and it spares your team from running GPUs at all. For most companies the winning setup sits in between, a hybrid that routes each request by how sensitive and how heavy it is.🧭 Part 10 of the ⚡ Hardware & Inference courseTL;DRAPI is the default, and under about a million tokens a day it is also the cheapest.
- ▪Should You Self-Host Inference?The honest economics of running your own models, and the breakeven most teams get wrong.Paolo PerroneJul 18, 20261881ShareSelf-hosting inference pays off in two cases: you push past roughly two million tokens
- ▪Below that line a hosted API is cheaper, and it spares your team from running GPUs at all.
- ▪For most companies the winning setup sits in between, a hybrid that routes each request by how sensitive and how heavy it is.🧭 Part 10 of the ⚡ Hardware & Inference courseTL;DRAPI is the default, and under about a million tokens a day it i
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://theaiengineer.substack.com/p/should-you-self-host-inference |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:34:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T13:40:44.203Z |
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Should You Self-Host Inference?The honest economics of running your own models, and the breakeven most teams get wrong.Paolo PerroneJul 18, 20261881ShareSelf-hosting inference pays off in two cases: you push past roughly two million tokens a day, or your data legally cannot leave your network. Below that line a hosted API is cheaper, and it spares your team from running GPUs at all. For most companies the winning setup sits in between, a hybrid that routes each request by how sensitive and how heavy it is.🧭 Part 10 of the ⚡ Hardware & Inference courseTL;DRAPI is the default, and under about a million tokens a day it is also the cheapest. No GPUs to babysit, and the smartest models are one call away.Self-hosting wins on volume and control.
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