AI API Pricing & Hardware Break-Even Calculator
Compare token costs per million across DeepSeek, Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq, and Mistral. Estimate your true monthly bills with prompt caching discounts and find out exactly when buying an Apple Silicon Mac or NVIDIA GPU pays for itself.
Monthly AI Workload Estimator
Adjust your monthly token consumption to calculate real billing across leading AI APIs.
When Does Buying a GPU or Mac Pay for Itself?
Saves ~$0 in your first year after paying for the machine and power!
Saves ~$0 in year 1 compared to OpenAI commercial rates.
DeepSeek API is so affordable ($0.30/1M input at peak, half that off-peak) that cloud hosting often beats hardware amortisation for light to medium volumes.
gpt-oss-20b (Groq)
OpenAI's open-weight gpt-oss-20b on Groq (published speed ~1000 tok/s).
Claude Haiku 5.5
Anthropic's fastest, lowest-cost model (prices for prompts up to 100k tokens; $0.50/$2.50 above that).
GPT-6 Luna
OpenAI's low-cost GPT-6 model (standard tier, short-context pricing).
gpt-oss-120b (Groq)
OpenAI's open-weight gpt-oss-120b served on Groq (published speed ~500 tok/s).
Mistral Small 4
Mistral's open-weight, Apache 2.0 multimodal model.
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash via deepseek-flash (peak-hour pricing; off-peak is 50% lower).
Gemini 3.8 Flash
Google's Flash model (promotional pricing through Dec 31, 2026; $1.50/$7.50 from Jan 1, 2027).
Qwen3.8 27B (Groq)
Qwen3.8 27B served on Groq (published speed ~450 tok/s).
DeepSeek V4-Pro
DeepSeek V4-Pro via deepseek-v4-pro (peak-hour pricing; off-peak is 50% lower).
Mistral Medium 3.5
Mistral's open-weight model for agentic and coding tasks.
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic's balanced model for coding and production workloads (1M context).
GPT-6.1 Sol
OpenAI's mid-tier GPT-6.1 model (standard tier, short-context pricing).
Gemini 3.1 Pro (Preview)
Google's Pro model (prices for prompts up to 200k tokens).
Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic's Opus model for long-running agentic coding and knowledge work (1M context).
GPT-5.6 Sol
OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol (promotional pricing through at least Nov 21, 2026).
Claude Fable 5.1
Anthropic's top model for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work (1M context).
GPT-6 Astra
OpenAI's flagship model (standard tier, short-context pricing).
Open-weight models served by API are now extremely cheap: DeepSeek V4.1-Flash lists $0.30 per 1M input tokens (peak; half that off-peak) and Groq serves gpt-oss-120b at $0.15 per 1M input, versus $2.00/1M for Claude Sonnet 5.5 and $2.00/1M for GPT-6.1 Sol. For light or occasional use, these APIs can cost less than the electricity (and hardware) for running the same open models locally. Prices checked October 10, 2026.
Local execution wins whenever zero data egress privacy is required (GDPR, medical, NDA codebases), when token volume exceeds 20M+ tokens/month on frontier models, or when unmetered local agent loops run 24/7 without risking unexpected monthly API bill shock.
Cost is only half the comparison
Break-even assumes the two options are otherwise equivalent, and for a lot of workloads they are not — an API call sends your prompt to someone else's server. Self-hosted AI covers what staying local actually protects and the stack it takes, and vLLM is the engine to look at if you are replacing an API rather than chatting.
Guides for going local
What the hardware side of this break-even calculation actually costs.
- Running Giant Open Models LocallyHardware sizing for DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.8 and Llama 4.Read the guide
- Best Budget GPUs for Local LLMs16GB cards, used RTX 3090s and current street prices.Read the guide
- Best Local LLM Runners: Ollama vs LM Studio vs Jan vs llama.cpp vs vLLMWhich runner suits your hardware and workflow.Read the guide