Three columns, one decision. Compare buying a GPU outright, renting one in the cloud, and paying per token across the leading AI APIs. Powered by live OpenRouter and GPU rental prices.
MSRP: $799 · TDP: 300 W · 16 GB VRAM
$0.3/M in · $2.5/M out
Over 36 months, the cheapest option is renting a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090.
Buy the GPU outright, run it on your power bill. Pays off over time if usage is steady.
Pay by the hour for a cloud GPU on RunPod or Vast.ai. No upfront cost, no idle expense if you stop using it.
Pay per token to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any OpenRouter-listed model. Frontier quality, zero ops.
Cumulative Cost Over Time
Self-hosting an AI model means buying a GPU and running the model on your own hardware. Renting means paying by the hour for a cloud GPU on a platform like RunPod or Vast.ai. Paying per token means calling a hosted API like GPT-4o or Claude and being billed only for the input and output tokens you use. This tool projects the total cost of each option over your chosen time horizon and picks the cheapest.
The self-host column adds the upfront GPU MSRP to the monthly electricity cost, derived from the card’s TDP, hours of use per day, and your local kWh rate. The rent column multiplies the cheapest current on-demand hourly rate from RunPod and the Vast.ai marketplace by your hours per day and the days in the month. The API column reads the live OpenRouter price for the chosen model and multiplies it by your daily token volume.
Self-hosting has the highest start because of the upfront purchase but the lowest monthly recurring cost, so it overtakes rent and API at a break-even month that depends on usage. Renting wins for bursty or research workloads. API wins for moderate steady usage because frontier model APIs are subsidized and run on infrastructure you cannot match locally.
Live Price Data
The API column is powered by live OpenRouter pricing for 200+ hosted models. Browse, filter, and sort the full feed to pick the right model for your decision.
Live hourly rates across RunPod and the Vast.ai marketplace — the same feed powering the Rent column.
The two-way self-host vs API calculator, with subscription and modality-specific inputs.
Once you decide to self-host, get a budget-matched parts list and pre-built option side by side.
Every open and closed model we track, ranked by benchmark score and hardware fit.
When usage is steady and high enough that the upfront cost amortizes inside your planning horizon. The chart shows the break-even month against both rent and API for the inputs you pick. As a rule of thumb, a $2,000 to $3,000 consumer GPU pays for itself against frontier-tier API spend in 6 to 18 months at steady workloads.
When your workload is bursty, short-lived, or research-y. You only pay for the hours the GPU is actually billed, there is no upfront cost, and you can use a much bigger card than you could afford to buy. Renting also wins when local hardware would sit idle most of the day.
Frontier APIs like GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro are heavily subsidized and run on optimized infrastructure you can not match at home. For light to moderate usage, the per-token cost ends up lower than the amortized cost of any GPU that can run a comparable open model.
Automatically. We take the VRAM of the hardware you picked on the self-host side and find the cheapest current on-demand rental on RunPod or Vast.ai that has at least that much memory. That keeps the comparison apples-to-apples — you are comparing renting the same class of card you would otherwise buy.
Yes. API prices come from the public OpenRouter feed cached for one hour. GPU rental prices come from RunPod’s GraphQL endpoint and the Vast.ai marketplace REST API, also cached for one hour. Electricity is the only input that is not live — set it to whatever your local rate actually is.
The tool only models cost. In production, self-host wins on data privacy and inference latency; rent wins on burst capacity and flexibility; API wins on quality and zero ops. If those soft factors matter for your decision, treat the cost column as one input among several.
Yes, indirectly. Hours per day determines both the electricity cost on self-host and the rent cost. If you set hours per day to 8, self-host is billed for 8 hours of electricity and rent is billed for 8 hours of GPU. API has no idle cost — you only pay per token used.
