Sunk Cost
How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
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I kept hearing "just buy a Mac and run models locally, it pays for itself" and wanted to check. Sunk Cost takes a machine, a model and how many tokens you use a day, and works out how long the hardware takes to pay back against renting the same model by the token.Obviously there are other reasons to buy your own hardware aside from just saving money on llms but this is just looking at it from a raw cost saving perspective.If you have any ideas on how I can make this more helpful lmk!
HN · launched Sep 15, 2026 · 46 upvotes (top 16%) · 0 views
Niche: ai token and inference cost trackers · 82 launches, 5 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- Prosumer
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 82 launches in ai token and inference cost trackers →
Could you build this?
Yes It is an interactive calculator web app with math formulas comparing hardware costs, electricity, token usage, and API pricing.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Claude Code, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Reasonix, OpenCode
Concerns raised: Automatic model swapping based on VRAM is jarring, Local setups rarely beat cloud economics purely on cost, Underestimated token limits without custom speeds
Feature requests: Manual tokens-per-second input, Backward cost calculation by speed and context, Support for multi-GPU RTX 6000 configurations
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 170 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #30 of 171 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 313 days after the earliest competitor.
- Frugon · hn · 2026-07-07 · 67 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Llmspeed · hn · 2026-10-17 · 329 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- LLMSpeed · ph · 2026-10-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I'm tired of my LLM bullshitting. So I fixed it · hn · 2026-01-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Throttle · ph · 2026-09-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- An unmetered LLM API–$6/month, no token tracking, no limits · hn · 2026-07-06 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s · hn · 2026-07-19 · 2935 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Mac LLM Calculator · ph · 2026-10-06 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.41
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