Podmonkey

Week 1 math: API vs GPU rental for your chatbot or RAG prototype.

Rough planning only (±40%). Pick a model, set requests/day and tokens in/out — we compare Groq, OpenAI, Together vs GPU hosts. Not an invoice.

Your workload

Set spec.model, requestsPerDay, inputTokensPerRequest / outputTokensPerRequest. Example: 800 tokens in (prompt + docs), 250 out (reply).

Start with an API — about $5/mo at your volume

Week 1 recommendation: use a hosted API and ship. Revisit GPU rental when you have steady traffic and a reason to self-host (privacy, fine-tuning, cost at scale).

Planning range $5–$6/mo
ModelLlama 3.1 8B Instruct
Requests / month90,000
Tokens / month94,500,000

Managed APIs

Fastest path in week 1 — no GPU setup. OpenAI row is a quality baseline, not the same open-weight model.

Groq

Llama 3.1 8B Instant

$5/mo

Best for week 1
  • $/1M tokens (blended)$0.06
  • Input / output$0.05 / $0.08 per 1M

Pricing as of 2026-06-23

Together AI

Llama 3.1 8B Turbo

$17/mo

  • $/1M tokens (blended)$0.18
  • Input / output$0.18 / $0.18 per 1M

Pricing as of 2026-06-23

OpenAI

GPT-4o mini (API baseline)

$24/mo

Quality baseline
  • $/1M tokens (blended)$0.26
  • Input / output$0.15 / $0.6 per 1M

Pricing as of 2026-06-23

GPU rental

Self-host when you need control or scale — budget eng time to set up vLLM or similar.

RunPod

RTX 4000 / T4 (16 GB)

$116/mo

  • Billingserverless (per second)
  • ~8.1s / requestprefill+decode
  • Serverless vs pod$116 / $285
  • Pod GPU util.26.6%
  • Serverless GPU (RTX 4000 / T4 (16 GB))$116
  • $/1M tokens$1.23

Pricing as of 2026-06-23

Modal

NVIDIA T4

$119/mo

  • Billingserverless (per second)
  • ~8.1s / requestprefill+decode
  • Serverless GPU (NVIDIA T4)$119
  • $/1M tokens$1.26

Pricing as of 2026-06-23

Replicate

NVIDIA T4

$164/mo

  • Billingserverless (per second)
  • ~8.1s / requestprefill+decode
  • Serverless GPU (NVIDIA T4)$164
  • $/1M tokens$1.73

Pricing as of 2026-06-23

Warnings

  • FOUNDER_PLANNINGWeek-1 planning estimate. APIs typically ±10%; GPU rental ±25%. Excludes eng time, egress, and storage.
  • POD_UNDERUTILIZEDAlways-on pods would run at ~26.6% GPU utilization — serverless (~$116/mo) beats pod (~$285/mo) at this volume.
  • PARTIAL_GPU_PROVIDERSSome GPU hosts omitted: lambda has no pricing for gpu tier t4-16gb; vast has no pricing for gpu tier t4-16gb