$240 a year: that’s the price of ChatGPT Plus, at $20 per month. Claude Pro and Gemini Advanced come in at nearly identical figures. Chances are you’ve never run the numbers on the alternative: running open-source models on your own hardware. This article puts real figures on both options, including the electricity bill.
The Price of the Subscription: $240 and a Ceiling
Paid plans have a problem the ad doesn’t mention: usage limits. In 2024, OpenAI set the maximum at 40 GPT-4o messages every three hours for Plus subscribers, and Anthropic applies similar windows to Claude Pro. When you hit the ceiling, the official way out is the API or the higher tier: ChatGPT Pro, launched in December 2024, costs $200 per month. That’s when how much your AI really costs starts to matter, because spending is no longer a fixed fee.
API pricing punishes heavy use. OpenAI launched GPT-4o mini in 2024 at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Anthropic set Claude 3.5 Sonnet at $3 and $15 respectively. A developer processing documents daily can easily exceed $50 per month. Rates change every few months, so check the current price list before deciding.
The Local Hardware Bill
A local machine requires a one-time outlay and two smaller costs. A 12 GB VRAM RTX 3060 can be found secondhand for around 250 euros — enough memory for quantized models: Llama 3.1 8B in Q4 format takes up roughly 5 GB. Software adds nothing to the price: Ollama is open source and LM Studio is free for personal use, and both run models like Mistral 7B or Gemma 2 with a single command or a couple of clicks. Then there’s electricity: with the machine drawing 250 watts for four hours a day, consumption comes to about 30 kWh per month, roughly 6 euros if you pay €0.20/kWh.
The cost that doesn’t show up at checkout is time. Installing Ollama takes minutes; setting up a RAG over your documents or fine-tuning a model for your domain can swallow entire afternoons. That preparatory work is the part of the equation the subscription takes care of for you.
You can run your own numbers in our local AI vs SaaS comparison, calculator included.
The Break-Even Point, Month by Month
The number that defines how much your AI really costs is the break-even point. The subscription runs about 19 euros a month; the local option costs 250 euros up front plus 6 euros in electricity — a savings of about 13 euros a month. The crossover arrives around month 20, and from then on the cost drops to 6 euros a month with the hardware already paid off. If your API spending runs around $60 a month, break-even drops to about five months.
These figures assume constant use. Anyone who queries the model three times a week will never recoup a dedicated GPU, and for that profile the subscription remains the rational choice.
What Doesn’t Show Up on the Bill
Quality is not neutral. A local 8B model performs well at summarization, extraction, and classification, but falls behind frontier models on complex reasoning and code. Weighing against that gap is privacy: your data never leaves your machine, a direct argument under the GDPR when you’re handling client material.
The subscription carries its own risk: OpenAI removed the early GPT-4 snapshots from its API on June 13, 2024. If your workflow depends on a model’s exact behavior, that dependency costs more than the price difference. Before deciding, measure your own usage pattern.
Conclusion: Measure Before You Pay
The answer to how much your AI really costs is in your usage logs, not in the ad. A concrete test: install Ollama, run ollama run llama3.1, work for two weeks with your real cases, and log every query and every API or subscription payment. With those two data points, the comparison stops being a matter of opinion. If usage is constant, the $240-a-year bill becomes, once the hardware is paid off, about 72 euros in electricity; if it isn’t, the $20 subscription buys you frontier models and the comfort of zero configuration.
If the math works out and you want the model running around the clock, our server guide compares providers honestly, and Deploy Express sets everything up for you within 24 hours.