[cicko]

True. But there are other meanings of "free". I.e. nobody can say "from now on you no longer have access to model X because you're an asshole"

[trollbridge]

Some obvious examples of why you'd want to spend the capital on this would be, for example, making some kind of autonomous system which needs to be periodically be offline, or you need complete confidentiality of what you're using the model for, etc.

To be cost effective with inference providers, you have to find some way to be using it 24/7.