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That comparison is nonsensical, it exploits a vulnerability in the retail system in order to not pay for the hardware at all.

On the other hand, if you do include the cost of the hardware it doesn't seem change the overall conclusion.

That card will only run a tiny model though, no?

> to use this card for 3 months and return it.

You're counting on most people being willing to abuse a return policy like that. Also, the 3 month return window must've activated 3 days ago. These prices didn't start just then.

> to use this card for 3 months and return it.

You can also keep it and return a bag of flour weighing the same.

Or even go to people houses and rob them at gun point to steal their hardware.

You're comparing apples to oranges. 109 million tokens is ~nothing, easily a day's worth of casual use. Compare price per token and cloud providers are probably much closer. But even that isn't a fair comparison between cloud AI providers and abusing retailer return policies just yet, because usable local models even remotely comparable to the frontier don't fit in 16gb of vram.

Yeah I did something similar but more extensive, because not every model is same plus depend on your options how much you want to degrade model from fp8. Some models is just slow on local hardware and not practical really.

localaicost.com

To be fair we don't know which direction that arbitrage will collapse to.

Missing from this analysis:

    - rate at which tokens are generated
    - quality of generated tokens
    - ethics of abusing return policies
    - long-term viability of abusing return policies

Yeah, and Qwen 3B that you run on 16GB of VRAM and 10K context length surely is comparable to whatever subscription you're comparing to, that also gives access to 3B parameter models? You might want to take actual use cases into account before you try this scam in real life.

I too did a cost breakdown of buying my GPU for ~10K EUR more than a year ago. It came out "Invaluable" as I use it for analyzing my diary, financials and other private things I cannot send to random 3rd parties.

But even the best of models you can run with 96GB VRAM really doesn't come close to the hosted SOTA models, sadly.

Firstly you are assuming $0.048$/hr for GPU, which is highly misleading and you can easily sell it for double(vast.ai is $0.12) as you are forgetting lot of cost like CPU, cooling etc.

Also even if you can somehow fit a few 100 billion parameter model(like gpt 6 luna or deepseek flash) in 16GB, and magically assume you can run at 200 tokens/sec according to your calculation, the blended cost of it would be around $100, not $1639.

I remember when the top GPU was 550€ and the overclocked, custom-cased, water-cooling ready version cost 660€ tops. Any GPU price out there even $800 for 5060Ti from january 2025 is not only out of any sane band, but look as if we're in a ultra-recession, yet other markets aren't affected nearly as extreme.

And imagine if you just stole electricity and GPU. It would be $0 vs 1639.50... The bubble becomes even more obvious!

You're comparing running a heavily quantized 10-30B model to running a multi trillion one. Being half the price (unless you expect to only need AI 3 months in your life) is absolutely not a good deal, here.

What it does buy, though, is privacy and freedom (nobody can decide to "change the terms" to milk you more).

You are exploiting a loophole. Calculate the differential if you use one of those "don't buy electronics, just rent them!" services.

This is such a boneheaded comparison.

It’s akin to saying “the new iPhone costs $2.5k, it weighs 250 g, I can get a piece of scrap aluminium for $30, checkmate liberals.”

Not sure that Kantian ethics supports the population mass buying Amazon cards for 90 day periods and then returning them en-masse.

This seems more like a sociopathic "hack" than an actual comment on the economy of selfhost vs inference-as-a-service.