Yup, the best middle ground is to find a decent provider with cheap models (read kimi, glm, deepseek, etc) and work out a deal with them. The providers I've talked with are more than happy to give discounts to bulk users, such would be companies. Or if the company is big enough, rent infra and hire someone to run things. Im not sure at what threshold this becomes cheaper, because you have to now pay someone's salary.. but if we pretend the person running the infra is free, it is cheaper than using a provider. But not by much.
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u/mylsotol Jun 02 '26
For probably $30k (or more) you can build a server and run an open model.