OPEN-SOURCE AI VS SAAS IN 2026: TOTAL COST, CONTROL AND THE SWITCHING MATH

Self-Host vs SaaS AI TCO Calculator

Monthly volume (M tokens)

250

H100 GPU rate

$/hr

Ops engineer hours/mo

Blended engineer rate

Proprietary SaaS cost$1,000/mo

Open-weights API cost$38.75/mo

Self-hosted cost$4,101.7/mo

SaaS assumes Sonnet 5 blended $4/M tokens (3:1 input:output); open-weights assumes DeepInfra Llama-3.3-70B blended $0.155/M tokens; self-hosted assumes one H100 node at 730 hrs/month plus ops labor.