Buy vs Rent
Two break-even questions for any accelerator: how many GPU-hours until owning beats renting it by the hour, and — the one people actually ask — how many tokens of hosted OpenRouter inference until the card pays for itself. Pure capital break-even: power, cooling, networking, and support are deliberately excluded.
127.7Btokens
Buy H100 SXM5 ($30K) instead of renting Llama 3.3 70B Instruct on OpenRouter, and you break even after serving 127,659,574,468.085 tokens.
7.9K GPU-hrs
≈ 10.8 months at 24/7 vs a ~$3.80/hr cloud rate.
$30K
Illustrative street/list price for one H100 SXM5.
Weights
70 GB
of 80 GB
Fits one card?
No
needs ~2× or lower quant
Decode speed
~38 tok/s
single stream
Capacity
3.3M/day
1 stream, 24/7
At full single-stream utilization, one H100 SXM5 would take 105.7 yr to serve the 127.7B tokens needed to break even. Your 50.0M/day demand exceeds one card’s single-stream capacity — batching or extra cards raise aggregate throughput well beyond this floor. At INT8 the weights do not fit one card — drop to a lower precision or shard across cards.
Fewest tokens = pays for itself fastest. Cheaper cards clear their price with far less usage.
| Accelerator | Buy price | Tokens to pay off | At 50.0M/day |
|---|---|---|---|
| $250 | 1.1B | 21 days | |
| $330 | 1.4B | 28 days | |
| $500 | 2.1B | 43 days | |
| $999 | 4.3B | 2.8 mo | |
| $1K | 5.5B | 3.7 mo | |
| $1K | 6.0B | 4.0 mo | |
| $3K | 10.6B | 7.1 mo | |
| $4K | 17.0B | 11.3 mo | |
| $5K | 21.3B | 1.2 yr | |
| $6K | 23.4B | 1.3 yr | |
| $7K | 28.9B | 1.6 yr | |
| $7K | 29.8B | 1.6 yr | |
| $8K | 34.0B | 1.9 yr | |
| $9K | 38.3B | 2.1 yr | |
| $10K | 40.9B | 2.2 yr | |
| $10K | 42.6B | 2.3 yr | |
| $11K | 46.8B | 2.6 yr | |
| $11K | 48.0B | 2.6 yr | |
| $12K | 49.0B | 2.7 yr | |
| $12K | 51.1B | 2.8 yr | |
| $15K | 63.8B | 3.5 yr | |
| $17K | 72.0B | 3.9 yr | |
| $18K | 76.6B | 4.2 yr | |
| $20K | 85.1B | 4.7 yr | |
| $25K | 106.4B | 5.8 yr | |
| $25K | 106.4B | 5.8 yr | |
| $30K | 127.7B | 7.0 yr | |
| $32K | 136.2B | 7.5 yr | |
| $34K | 144.7B | 7.9 yr | |
| $35K | 147.1B | 8.1 yr | |
| $36K | 153.2B | 8.4 yr | |
| $38K | 161.7B | 8.9 yr | |
| $40K | 170.2B | 9.3 yr | |
| $85K | 361.7B | 19.8 yr |