Self-Hosted LLM vs API: When Does Self-Hosting Pay Off

At October 8, 2026 prices, a 27B model on one rented RTX 3090 breaks even against API pricing at roughly 6–12% load, while DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on four rented H200s never beats the cheapest zero-data-retention API endpoint. The post computes break-even load as GPU hourly rent divided by the API cost of the same hour of tokens, using live per-provider prices and benchmark throughput, and notes that published self-hosting costs near a cent per million tokens mostly count cached input tokens that are also nearly free via API. It also covers privacy options such as provider.zdr and EU/US in-region domains, and suggests self-hosting a steady base load while sending peaks to the API.