Run or Rent

UK · pounds · no account

Is it cheaper to run the model, or rent the API?

For people who use Ollama, LM Studio or llama.cpp, and for small firms deciding whether to buy a GPU or keep paying the API. The sums are in pounds, and every number has a source or is labelled an estimate.

The job
Chatbot for a small teamSummarise 1,000 documentsCoding assistant all day

8 people, 25 questions on each of 21 working days. 1,500 tokens in (the question plus a short history) and 400 tokens out. A worked example, not a log from a real team.

Model and card

from £1,499.99 at Scan, checked 11 November 2026.

Ofgem price cap, average electricity unit rate for a Direct Debit customer in England, Scotland and Wales on a single-rate default tariff. No VAT on electricity in this period, per Ofgem. The daily standing charge is not included. Your region and payment method can differ. Ofgem, 1 October 2026 to 31 December 2026.

Speed and power

Filled when a sourced run exists. Otherwise type the speed you see in Ollama, LM Studio or llama.cpp.

Starts at the card's maximum rated power. Lower it if you measured the draw.

Not enough yet

The API comes to £0.14 a month for this job. There is no speed for running it locally, so the electricity and the break-even are left blank.

Memory. Meta: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct against GeForce RTX 5080's 16 GB, estimated from the Hub's published weight size across the common quants: BF16 16.1 GB no · Q8_0 8.5 GB yes · Q6_K 6.6 GB yes · Q5_K_M 5.7 GB yes · Q4_K_M 4.9 GB yes · IQ4_XS 4.3 GB yes · Q3_K_M 3.9 GB yes · Q2_K 3 GB yes. At Q8_0, about 8.5 GB, 7.5 GB of the card's 16 GB is left for the context cache. Rule of thumb, not a measured file size.

API this month
£0.14
Electricity this month
Blank
GPU purchase
£1,499.99
Break-even
Needs a speed
  • API cost is input tokens and output tokens, priced per million, times jobs per month. No caching, batch discount, or free tier.
  • Pound figures use the stored exchange rate. They are not a quote from the company that trained the model.
  • No tokens-per-second figure, so the electricity line is blank. Type one in if you have measured it.
  • API price: £0.0149 in and £0.0298 out per million tokens, from $0.0200 and $0.0400 at 0.74501 dollars to the pound on 2026-11-10. OpenRouter feed 2026-11-11.
  • GeForce RTX 5080: 16 GB GDDR7. Total graphics power: 360 W. Specs read 2026-11-11.
  • No sourced speed for this pair, and none was typed in.
  • Upper estimate, based on the official total graphics power of 360 W.

OpenRouter prices · Exchange rate · GPU spec · Ofgem unit rate