[throwawayffffas]

I run qwen 27b at home when working it pulls around 400W. I get 40ish tokens per second generation and more importantly about 1000 tokens per second prompt processing.

In an hour it can process 3.6 million tokens or generate 144000 tokens. This costs me about 15 cents given my electricity prices.

For sonnet the equivalent token costs are 7.2 dollars for the prompt processing or 1.4 dollars for the generation. The cloud is 10x more expensive for generation and close to 50 times more expensive for processing.

[why_only_15]

The correct comparison is not sonnet, but qwen3.5-27b on a cloud. Alibaba's pricing [0] is $0.20/m input $1.56/m output, so $0.72 for the prompt processing or $0.22 for the generation. Yours is still cheaper but the margins are less.

My guess is that this math gets less good with MoE (because you will be limited by VRAM, but clouds won't).

[0]: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.5-27b

[throwawayffffas]

I run 3.6 but yeah you are right

[Figs]

> it pulls around 400W

Try dropping the power cap on your GPU if it supports it; you can often get much lower energy usage with minimal loss of tok/s (particularly during generation) than whatever the GPU defaults to. There's a sweet spot around 200W on the GPU I'm currently testing that gives me about ~75% of the max pp and 97% of tg while using 100W less than the default/max 300W power cap -- and the card runs much quieter as a result.