Open-Source LLM APIs Beat Self-Hosting. Here's the Math.

So here's what happened: open-Source LLM APIs Beat Self-Hosting. Here's the Math. Last quarter I sat down with my cofounder and did the math I should have done six months earlier. We'd been running two A100s on Lambda Labs to serve Qwen3-32B for our internal summarization pipeline. The bill was sitting at around $1,400 a month for what turned out to be roughly 30M tokens of actual traffic. Meanwhile, the same model on the open-source route through Global API would've cost us $8.40 for the…