A Cost-Benefit Analysis of On-Premise Large Language Model Deployment: Breaking Even with Commercial LLM Services

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pan, Guanzhong, Chodnekar, Vishal, Roy, Abinas, Wang, Haibo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Pan, Guanzhong
Chodnekar, Vishal
Roy, Abinas
Wang, Haibo
author_facet Pan, Guanzhong
Chodnekar, Vishal
Roy, Abinas
Wang, Haibo
contents Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly widespread. Organizations that want to use AI for productivity now face an important decision. They can subscribe to commercial LLM services or deploy models on their own infrastructure. Cloud services from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are attractive because they provide easy access to state-of-the-art models and are easy to scale. However, concerns about data privacy, the difficulty of switching service providers, and long-term operating costs have driven interest in local deployment of open-source models. This paper presents a cost-benefit analysis framework to help organizations determine when on-premise LLM deployment becomes economically viable compared to commercial subscription services. We consider the hardware requirements, operational expenses, and performance benchmarks of the latest open-source models, including Qwen, Llama, Mistral, and etc. Then we compare the total cost of deploying these models locally with the major cloud providers subscription fee. Our findings provide an estimated breakeven point based on usage levels and performance needs. These results give organizations a practical framework for planning their LLM strategies.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18101
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Cost-Benefit Analysis of On-Premise Large Language Model Deployment: Breaking Even with Commercial LLM Services
Pan, Guanzhong
Chodnekar, Vishal
Roy, Abinas
Wang, Haibo
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly widespread. Organizations that want to use AI for productivity now face an important decision. They can subscribe to commercial LLM services or deploy models on their own infrastructure. Cloud services from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are attractive because they provide easy access to state-of-the-art models and are easy to scale. However, concerns about data privacy, the difficulty of switching service providers, and long-term operating costs have driven interest in local deployment of open-source models. This paper presents a cost-benefit analysis framework to help organizations determine when on-premise LLM deployment becomes economically viable compared to commercial subscription services. We consider the hardware requirements, operational expenses, and performance benchmarks of the latest open-source models, including Qwen, Llama, Mistral, and etc. Then we compare the total cost of deploying these models locally with the major cloud providers subscription fee. Our findings provide an estimated breakeven point based on usage levels and performance needs. These results give organizations a practical framework for planning their LLM strategies.
title A Cost-Benefit Analysis of On-Premise Large Language Model Deployment: Breaking Even with Commercial LLM Services
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18101