Cost engine
Buy a rig, or rent the cloud?
A local machine costs money up front but is cheap to run; the cloud costs nothing up front but adds up. Pick what you want to run and how much you'll use it — we'll show when buying pays for itself.
Default is a typical street price — edit to match what you see. check current price →
Buy it
$289 once
+ ~$6/mo electricity (270 W · 4 h/day)
Rent the cloud
~$60/mo
at ~$0.5/hr for a GPU that runs Llama 3.1 8B
Buying the Intel Arc B580 (12GB) pays for itself in about 5 months vs renting, at 4 h/day — then it's ~$54/mo cheaper.
Total cost over time
| After | Buy | Rent | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 mo | $363 | $720 | Buy |
| 24 mo | $437 | $1,440 | Buy |
| 36 mo | $511 | $2,160 | Buy |
Estimates. Hardware prices are typical street defaults as of June 2026 — edit the price field above to match what you actually see. Power draw, electricity rates, and cloud prices vary; cloud rates are a representative on-demand figure for the model's size class. Excludes the cost of the rest of a PC for GPU rigs.
Not sure which machine? See what to buy →