ollama vs cloud api costs: ran both for a month. heres the real numbers

been running ollama on a 4090 rig for about 6 months now and finally did the math on whether this actually saves money vs just using claude or gpt apis.

my setup pulls about 450w under load (whole system not just gpu) electricity here is 0.14 per kwh. if im running inference constantly thats like $47 a month just in power. realistically though im only hitting it maybe 4-5 hours a day so more like $10 monthly.

ran some numbers on my actual usage. i do maybe 200-300 requests per day mix of quick stuff and longer context work if i was doing that on claude api at average 50k tokens per session id be spending probably $80-120 monthly easy.

so yeah local wins for me but only because i actually use it a ton. if youre just messing around occasionally or doing like 20 requests a day the api is definitely cheaper when you factor in hardware depreciation too.

the real win is privacy and no rate limits though. being able to throw whatever at a local model without worrying about costs per token or context limits is worth it for my workflow but purely on electricity vs api cost it only makes sense if you're a heavy user