cost

6 articles · newest first

AI

what does it actually cost to run a local LLM? the electricity bill nobody calculates

Everyone talks about the GPU price, but a local AI rig has a running cost too. It's smaller than you fear — but if you're in Europe, it's not nothing. Here's the real math.

Ravi Malhotra · 2d ago · 9 min

AI

the best cloud GPU for fine-tuning an LLM costs about a dollar — here's the one to rent and why

Fine-tuning sounds expensive until you realize you can rent the perfect GPU for it by the hour. For small models a 4090 does it for pennies; for bigger jobs an A100 is the workhorse. Here's the cheapest path.

Lena Fischer · 2d ago · 9 min

AI

the cheapest way to run Llama 70B isn't buying two GPUs — it's renting one big one for a couple dollars

A dual-GPU rig to run Llama 70B costs $2,000+. But you can rent an A100 that holds it for around a dollar an hour. For anything but constant use, the cloud wins big.

Lena Fischer · 2d ago · 9 min

AI

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? Here's the number that decides it for you.

Ravi Malhotra · 2d ago · 9 min

AI

the cheapest way to rent a GPU for AI in 2026 costs less than a coffee an hour — here's the live math

You don't need to buy a $2,000 graphics card to run big AI models. Renting one by the hour starts at cents, and knowing the real prices saves you a fortune. Here's what GPUs actually cost to rent right now.

Ravi Malhotra · 2d ago · 9 min

AI

everyone thinks fine-tuning an AI model costs a fortune. tuning Llama 8B on your own GPU costs about a coffee

The scary numbers you've seen are for training models from scratch. Fine-tuning an existing Llama 8B on your own data with QLoRA fits a 24GB card, uses ~14GB, and costs under a dollar per run if you rent. Here's the real math.

Lena Fischer · 2d ago · 9 min