Self-hosting AI does not save money, and I do it anyway

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA News
self-hosting local-llm ai-costs privacy inference

Summary

A Reddit user shares their blog post arguing that self-hosting AI models does not actually save money compared to API subscriptions, but explains they do it anyway for privacy reasons such as keeping personal data off external APIs.

Hi folks, I'm a long-time lurker and big fan of this subreddit and a massive self-hosting fan (also outside of AI). I doubt many people will disagree with me here because I see the same arguments being made in many posts. However, I thought it might be interesting to share anyway. I wrote down why self-hosting AI does not save money: https://www.nijho.lt/post/self-hosting-ai-is-not-cheaper/ EDIT: didn't think this would be so controversial 😅 I do say explicitly in my blog post "I would never send 200 GB of email, my messages, and my location history to an API, zero data retention or not". EDIT 2: Comparing $200 sub with Opus 5.5 or Astra with Qwen 3.8 27B is not apples to apples.
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