Guides & Tutorials
11 min
Own GPU vs Pay-per-Token: Where an RTX 4090 Breaks Even Against an LLM API
A measured cost model for running a 27B model on a card you own versus paying per token: what a 4090 actually produces at one and at sixteen concurrent requests, what it draws at the wall loaded and idle, and the utilization at which owning becomes cheaper. Sixteen requests deep, the card breaks even at about 20% utilization in Germany and 15% in the US. One request at a time, it never does. A calculator script takes your own numbers.
self-hostingRTX 4090cost analysis