break-even

3 articles · newest first

Flat illustration of a person with a briefcase at a fork in the road, a toll booth with a barrier on the left road and a paperwork desk with a stack of papers and a rubber stamp on the right road

Merchant of record vs Stripe Tax (2026): the MRR where filing your own VAT pays off

A merchant of record costs a few hundred dollars a month at $10k MRR, and you only get that money back if filing yourself costs less. The break-even formula, a table for four filing costs, and the question that comes first: do you owe tax at all?

Aliteq Team · Oct 3 · 10 min

Hand-drawn editorial illustration of a level seesaw balancing a graphics card on one end against a tall stack of lime-green coins on the other

AI Automation

Self-Hosted LLM vs API Break-Even: Tokens per Day by Model (Live GPU Prices)

Renting a GPU for an open model looks cheaper than paying per token until you price the same model on the cheapest API. We did it for four open models, from Llama 3.1 8B to Llama 3.3 70B, with live GPU rates from our own tracker and list prices read on 2 October 2026. Against the same model's API, one rented GPU almost never wins. Against a frontier model, it wins from about 2 to 6 million tokens a day.

Aliteq Team · Oct 2 · 12 min

A scale weighing cloud versus local computing

should you rent a cloud GPU or buy your own for AI? the break-even is simpler than you think

Everyone frames it as cloud vs local like it's a religion. It's just arithmetic: how many hours will you actually use it? For a $1,000 used 3090 vs ~$0.22/hr on-demand rental, the answer is about 4,500 hours.

Aliteq Team · Jul 28 · 9 min