Sunk Cost
How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
Details
- External ID
- 49706656
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Sunk Cost
- Website domain
- sunkcost.ai
- Launched
- Sept. 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 46
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8444976076555024
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 19, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 19, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Description
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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- payments, billing, and wallet infrastructure
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- roi calculator for local llm hardware setups
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 111 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #21 of 112 (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
- I'm tired of my LLM bullshitting. So I fixed it · hn · 2026-01-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s · hn · 2026-07-19 · 2935 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Throttle · ph · 2026-09-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I was laid off, so I built a NerdWallet for startup equity liquidity · hn · 2026-03-16 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- An unmetered LLM API–$6/month, no token tracking, no limits · hn · 2026-07-06 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Bloomberg Terminal for LLM ops · hn · 2026-04-13 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- VRAMGlass · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.