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by jrandolf 80 days ago
24/7 LLM for $10/month.
1 comments

Isn't this a bad deal? Or is there an error in my math?

For $40, I'd get 20 tok/s * 2.6M seconds per month = 52M tokens of DeepSeek v3.2 per month if I run it 24/7, which is not realistic for most workloads.

On OpenRouter [1], $40 buys 105M tokens from the same model, which is more than 52M tokens, and I can freely choose when to use them.

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2

20 tok/s is an average. It can be more, it can be less. If you are running off-peak I'm sure you'd get some crazy number.
That doesn’t matter when you have the average. Even if you are somehow able to get 10000tok/s during off peak times, by virtue of how averages work, you’re still only getting 52M tokens per month (as calculated above).
Why wouldn't developers just do llm arbitrage against openrouter if it is a better deal?
The problem is different. OpenRouter is a router to LLMs. It doesn't solve GPU underutilization.
What I am saying is if your system lets me pay $x/token and open router lets me pay $y/token if x<y then someone could make money just by providing those tokens through the open router API. That would either drive up demand for your systems increasing costs or drive up supply on open router decreasing costs. Eventually the costs would converge, no?
For the same reason people don’t do server arbitrage because Hetzner is cheaper than AWS.