Poolside's Laguna S-2.1 just got priced: how it stacks up against the incumbents
Laguna S-2.1's listed API rates against Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Luna Pro show whether the new entrant undercuts incumbents or just adds another tab to compare.
Compute economics, explained
Short and practical: every guide links to live data instead of quoting prices that rot.
The cheapest capable small model right now: Qwen3 Flash vs Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Flash-Lite
Ranking Qwen3 Flash, Gemini 3.6 Flash, and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite by real per-request cost using live provider data.
KAT-Coder Air vs Pro v2.5: pricing the two tiers against real agent workloads
Shows when KAT-Coder Air's discount over Pro v2.5 survives an input-heavy coding agent workload and when it collapses to almost nothing.
Kimi K2.7 Is Trending: The Token Volume Where Self-Hosting Beats the API
A memory and compute breakdown of Kimi K2.7 Code's footprint pinpoints the monthly token volume where renting B200 or H200 capacity undercuts the hosted API.
Gemini 3.6 Flash Batch vs standard: how much latency you trade for the discount
Shows when Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite's batch discount pays for the multi-hour turnaround delay and when it doesn't.
Claude Opus 5 vs Opus 5 Fast: what the 'fast' tier actually costs you
How to check whether Claude Opus 5 Fast's lower per-token rate actually lowers total agent cost once retry rates are counted, using live pricing and open-model analogs.
Multi-GPU inference: what tensor parallelism really costs
Explains how interconnect tier determines whether tensor parallelism scales linearly or falls off a cliff.
Renting from GPU marketplaces without getting burned
How to vet marketplace GPU listings for bandwidth, isolation, and hidden costs before you commit rental hours to one.
vLLM vs Ollama: prototyping is not production
Ollama and vLLM handle concurrent requests so differently that the choice determines whether your GPU bill triples once real traffic arrives.
Spot and interruptible GPU rentals: when the discount is worth it
Community and spot GPU tiers run 70%+ cheaper than secure rentals on identical silicon, but the payoff depends on whether your workload survives interruption.
GLM-5.2, Kimi K2.7, MiniMax M3: the 'want to self-host but probably shouldn't' tier
VRAM math for three frontier open-weight models shows they require multi-card GPU clusters to serve.
The local LLM hardware ladder, mid-2026
Used 24GB cards, 128GB unified memory boxes, Macs, and the RTX PRO 6000 96GB each cap out differently, and renting the same silicon is the rung most buyers skip.
The RAM price shock broke 2025's self-hosting math
DDR5 price inflation raised the cost basis for CPU-offload MoE rigs, moving the buy-versus-rent breakeven toward renting by a wide margin.
NVFP4 on Blackwell: when the fancy quant actually pays
NVFP4 only speeds up inference on Blackwell tensor cores; on Hopper and Ada silicon it shrinks VRAM but leaves throughput untouched.
DSpark made self-hosting DeepSeek V4 Flash faster, and the API price didn't move
DeepSeek's DSpark speculative decoding lowers self-hosted V4 Flash serving cost while API pricing holds, moving the rent-vs-API breakeven point.
What a 1M-token context actually costs (spoiler: a huge spread)
How to price filling a 1M-token context window across providers and self-hosted GPUs, and when compacting context beats paying for either.
Total params pay the memory bill, active params pay the compute bill
Explains why sparse MoE models split into two separate cost drivers, and why that split favors A3B-class models for self-hosting over dense 70B.
The flat-rate agent era is over: subscription vs API vs open models, priced honestly
How to size agent-token volume against subscription credits, raw API, open-weight models, and self-hosted GPUs now that flat-rate plans stop covering programmatic use.
Sticker price lies: cache-hit rates decide what you actually pay
Explains how to calculate the effective per-token price of an agent workload once cache-hit rate, write premiums, and TTLs are factored in.
Why your coding agent costs 10-100x what chat does
Agent loops rebill the growing transcript on every tool call, so cost per completed task can run far above a single chat turn.
DeepSeek retires the R1-era API on July 24: your migration options, priced
How to migrate off DeepSeek's retiring reasoner API by July 24, priced across V4 Flash, V4 Pro, third-party R1 hosting, and self-hosting the weights.
The breakeven math: API tokens vs renting a GPU
The complete formula for deciding whether to pay per token or rent the hardware: the three variables that matter, and the mistakes that flip the answer.
Secure, community, marketplace: how to read GPU rental tiers
The same H100 can cost $1.30 or $3.30 an hour. The difference is the tier: what each one guarantees, and when the cheap one is the right call.
H100 vs H200 vs B200 for inference: which should you rent?
Three generations of NVIDIA datacenter GPUs are rentable side by side right now. How to choose by workload: memory, bandwidth, or compute.
The cheapest way to run DeepSeek R1 in 2026
API, managed endpoints, or renting your own GPU cluster: how to cost out DeepSeek R1's 685B MoE, with the distillation trap and a decision rule to apply today.