LOCAL INFERENCE / ROI
When does local inference pay back?
Dual DGX Spark · DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 · U.S. reference prices
Estimated Cash payback
6.1months- Hardware and deployment investment
- $9,449
- Avoided API cost
- $1,586 / month
- Local cash cost
- $47 / month
- Monthly net cash savings
- $1,538 / month
Deployment configuration
Quick adjust
- GPU
- 2 × NVIDIA DGX Spark
- Model
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
- Throughput
- 175 tok/s
- Runtime
- 24.0 hours / day
- Electricity
- $0.14 / kWh
Full-load inference around the clock
Investment payback trend
Investment is paid at month zero; avoided API cost then accumulates after power and operations.
Cash position
Notes
- Actual utilization can materially change savings and the payback period.
- Electricity-price changes directly affect local cash cost and net savings.
- API pricing or billing-rule changes can alter the avoidable API cost.
- For DGX Spark deployments, keep the context length around 200,000 tokens to preserve response speed.
- Model output may occasionally get stuck in a repetitive loop; stop and retry when needed.
Economic payback (including net resale)
Not enabledCalculation basis
Cash payback
investment ÷ (avoided API − power − operations)
Economic payback (including net resale)
cumulative cash savings − investment + net resale at that month
- API value of original demand
- $1,586 / month
- Output covered locally
- 453.60M output / month
- Value still on API
- $0 / month