Forty-Three Years Was Last Month’s Price

What Happened

The arithmetic checks out; the date on it does not What the tool says, what reproduces from its own files, and what has changed since those files were written.

• 43.6Years to break even, on the tool’s published default settings
• 13 / 13Published figures that recompute exactly from the project’s own data files
• 0 / 98Measured speed rows in its data that cover the machine in that default
• 19 – 183Years to break even across the 20 hosts serving that model today
• 3.8%How much the answer moves if the machine’s electricity were free

Timeline

Thirty-nine days from the price check to the price The data was compiled before the machine it describes went on sale, and the figure reached a new audience four weeks later.

1. 12 Mar 2025A research group publishes the trend the whole question turns on: the price of a given level of capability has fallen steeply and repeatedly, by as much as 40-fold a year on one benchmark.
2. 3 Sep 2026The project records its prices and defaults as checked. The model in the default is priced at $0.32 in and $2.50 out per million tokens, by the rule “cheapest active endpoint”.
3. 15 Sep 2026The calculator is posted to a public forum. It draws 47 points and 99 comments, and the first of them refuses the premise: privacy, the commenter writes, makes it pay off instantly.
4. 22 Sep 2026The machine in the default setting ships — nineteen days after the data describing it was compiled. Its speed in the calculation is an estimate from memory bandwidth, and is labelled as one.
5. 11 Oct 2026The figure is reported to a Chinese-language audience, twenty-six days after it was published and thirty-eight days after the prices behind it were read.
6. 12 Oct 2026The same model’s live prices are read across twenty active hosts. By the tool’s own rule the workload now costs about a quarter of the recorded figure, and the twenty prices do not agree with each other either.

The Argument

Four inputs, and only two of them matter Each row below moves one input and leaves the rest at the published defaults.

What Others Add

“The cloud price” is not a number Twenty hosts, one model, one day, and the break-even each of them implies for the same machine.

• The switch nobody mentioned

  43.6 years is the kindest answer available

  Off by default

  • The tool carries an option to let API prices keep falling. It is switched off by default, so the headline holds today’s price flat for forty-three years.
  • Its own note: prices “have not behaved that way”, and switching the option on “pushes break-even out”.
  • Past a point, the note says, “the API costs less than your electricity” and break-even “stops being reachable at all”.

• What it leaves out

  And says so, item by item

  From the project’s own files

  • The whole purchase is charged to inference. Nothing is credited for video work, compilation, or anything else the machine does, and nothing is amortised against resale.
  • The power figures for the 2026 machines are stand-ins, because the maker has not published any; every affected row is flagged.
  • The daily ceiling treats reading your prompt as costing no time. Its own note: the real ceiling is “plausibly 20-30% lower”.

• What it cannot price

  The first reply refused the premise

  A public forum, 15 September 2026

  • “It pays off instantly, because [the vendors] can no longer see what I’m doing… If I am offloading some of my thought processes to a machine, I want to own that machine.”
  • A second reply makes the methodological point in the tool’s favour: the fair comparison is a host running the same open model, which is what it does.
  • Offline stability, no change of terms, no change of price and no content rules are in the same category: real, and not expressible in dollars a month.

Conclusion

Which way of buying inference suits which buyer The calculation answers one question well. It is not the only question, and it is not the same question for everybody.

• Rent it

  If the bill is the reason

  Half a million tokens a day or fewer

  • Best at: costing nothing up front, never being the wrong machine, and getting cheaper while you sit still.
  • At this usage the bill is a few dollars a month, and the hardware would need decades of them.
  • The trade-off: your work goes to somebody else’s machine, and the price, the terms and the model can change without you.

• Buy it

  If the volume is already there

  Millions of tokens a day, every day

  • Best at: turning a fixed cost into unlimited use. The machine does not charge by the token, so the heavier the day the better it looks.
  • Three years’ payback at 7.3 million tokens a day, about one year at 20 million — both within the machine’s own ceiling, and both a long way above the default.
  • The trade-off: it is slower per token than a data centre, and the hosted price you are beating is falling underneath you.

• Buy it anyway

  If the reason was never the bill

  Confidential work, or no network

  • Best at: the things no calculator has a column for. The work never leaves the room, the terms cannot change, and it runs with the network down.
  • Where confidentiality is a legal requirement rather than a preference, the break-even question does not arise at all.
  • The trade-off: be honest that this is what you bought. The arithmetic above is not an argument against it, and it is not an argument for it either.

• Work out your own two numbers before anything else: tokens a day, and the price of the host you would actually use. Together they move the answer by a factor of ten or more. The machine’s speed and its electricity move it by under four per cent between them.
• Check the date on any break-even figure, including this one. The prices behind the headline were five weeks old when it reached a new audience, and the workload they describe had changed by about four times in the meantime.
• Price the host you would use, not “the cloud”. Twenty of them serve this one model today and their input prices differ by 25-fold. Which one you pick changes the answer more than anything you could buy.
• If you bought the machine for privacy, say so and stop doing the sum. The calculation charges the whole purchase to inference and credits nothing for anything else the machine does. It answers a question about money; it was never the question you were asking.