Local LLMs Are Finally Cheaper Than Cloud APIs

Price per token is cratering

For most of 2025 the math favoured hosted APIs: you paid for convenience, reliability and scale. That has flipped. A 70B-class open model served on a rented 2×H100 box now beats the per-token cost of equivalent closed APIs for sustained throughput.

The catch is engineering time. Teams that already run Kubernetes and can absorb cold-start latency are saving 40–60% monthly. Everyone else should wait — the managed open-weight providers are closing the gap fast.