LOCAL AI VS CLOUD AI IN 2026: WHEN RUNNING MODELS ON-DEVICE ACTUALLY PAYS OFF
When does owning a GPU beat cloud AI pricing?
Tokens processed per month
50M tokens
1M tokens
500M tokens
Owned GPU, 24-mo amortized
$196/mo
Ollama Cloud hosted
$22/mo
Haiku 4.5, batch+cache
$75/mo
Owned GPU only pays off past ≈ 131M tokens/mo vs Haiku 4.5, and ≈ 445M tokens/mo vs Ollama Cloud.