AI API Cost Calculator
| Model | Input | Output | Cache Savings | Monthly | 12mo Total |
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Faraday Machines On-Premises
Run the same models on hardware you own. Zero per-token cost. Clusters of Mac Studios with 128GB RAM and 512GB SSD each — enough to run frontier models locally. The only limit is throughput.
How This Calculator Works
API pricing is quoted per million tokens, but most teams never see the advertised rate. Prompt caching discounts help, but only for the portion of input that repeats across calls. We factor in your cache hit rate to show the effective cost, not the sticker price. Choose your team size, usage profile, and time period to see the real monthly and total spend across all major providers side by side.
Why On-Premises Scales Better
Cloud API costs grow linearly with usage. A team of 10 heavy developers burning 2B input tokens each per month pays the same per-token rate on their first dollar as their millionth. On-premises inverts that curve. You pay once for hardware and the marginal cost of every additional token is zero. As your team grows, throughput scales with cluster size — and unlike GPU servers, each Mac Studio costs $10K, fits on a desk, and draws less power than a light fixture. No separate cooling, no data center leases, no specialized facilities.
Clusters of Four, Scaled by Multiples
A single cluster maxes out at 4 Mac Studios — that's the RDMA and parallelization sweet spot for inter-node memory bandwidth. Need more? Add another cluster. 8 units is two clusters, 16 is four, 64 is sixteen. Each runs independently with its own model: marketing on DeepSeek V4, engineering on GLM-5.1, zero contention. Compare that to an NVIDIA DGX at $300K+ that needs dedicated cooling, power infrastructure, and still has a single point of failure. A Faraday cluster is $40K per four units, sits on a desk, and if one unit goes down the rest keep running.
Run the Numbers on Your Own Hardware
Faraday Machines clusters run Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.1, Qwen 3.6, and DeepSeek V4 at full speed with zero per-token costs. The calculator shows the math — we’ll help you verify it with your own workloads.
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