Last updated: April 5, 2026 · Pricing & Deployment · by Daniel Ashford
What is Self-Hosting?
Running an LLM on your own hardware instead of using a cloud API.
Definition
Self-hosting means running a language model on your own infrastructure rather than using a third-party API. This gives complete data control, eliminates per-token costs, and allows customization through fine-tuning.
How It Works
Self-hosting is only practical with open-weight models like Llama 4, Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek. Requirements include NVIDIA GPUs with sufficient VRAM. Monthly costs range from $2-5K for a single setup to $10-30K for production. The breakpoint where self-hosting becomes cheaper than API calls is typically above 50-100M tokens per month.
Example
A hospital self-hosts Llama 4 405B on 4x H100 GPUs ($8K/month) to ensure patient data never leaves their infrastructure.
Related Terms
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