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BUILD ORBUY?

At what volume does renting — or owning — a GPU beat paying per token? Pit the API against cloud rental and hardware you buy, and watch the lines cross.

Rental rates verified 2026-06-21Math runs in your browser

01 — Workload

API model (the per-token option)

Monthly volume: 100M tokens

1M – 100B / month

Input share: 70% prompt / 30% output

prompt-heavy ← → output-heavy

Self-host throughput: 50 tok/s

tokens / sec

02 — Rent

Cloud GPU (rented by the hour)

03 — Own

Hardware you buy

Amortize over: 24 mo

months

Electricity: $0.18/kWh

$ / kWh

Monthly cost — three ways

Pay-per-token API

Claude Sonnet 4.6

$660

$6.60/MTok

Rent a GPU

RTX 4090 · 556 GPU-hrs/mo

$383.33

$3.83/MTok

Own the hardwarecheapest

RTX 4090 · $114.58 amort + $55.00 power

$169.58

$1.70/MTok

Break-even — owning vs API

18.9M tok/mo

Above this volume, buying the RTX 4090 is cheaper than the Claude Sonnet 4.6API. You're currently at 100M/mo — owning already wins.

Self-host hours assume you only pay for time spent generating at the throughput above (prefill is faster). Rental is RunPod secure on-demand; owned adds ~100W host overhead and your electricity rate. Hardware prices are volatile — treat as a guide.

─── Your Break-Even Card ───

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Deciding build vs buy?

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