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Everyone says self-hosting saves money at scale, and you have no idea what scale means for your app.
What you'll have at the end
A written break-even token volume compared to your actual monthly usage, with a clear yes-or-no decision
You need
A live feature already sending real API traffic, with enough usage history, a few weeks is plenty, to know roughly how many tokens it moves and what your provider bills for it.
Not covered
Non-cost reasons to self-host, like data residency rules or keeping full control of a fine-tuned model; those can outweigh the numbers here no matter what scale says.
Leans on
Work out your app's cost per request before you build the rest
start there instead if you only have a rough per-request cost and no real monthly token volume yet; this recipe needs that volume as its starting point.
Quantize a model without losing your eval score
go there once the numbers favor self-hosting, to fit the chosen model onto fewer GPUs without losing the eval score a smaller one would cost you.
Checked 18 Aug 2026
Part of the AI Engineering cookbook