There are two costs associated with using a hosted inference platform: the OpEx of API calls, and the CapEx of setting up an account in the first place. This second cost is usually trivial, as it just requires things any regular person already has: an SSO account, a phone number for KYC, etc.

But, insofar as your use-case is against the TOUs of the big proprietary inference platforms, this second cost quickly swamps the first cost. They keep banning you, and you keep having to buy new dark-web credentials to come back.

Given this, it’s a lot cheaper and more reliable — you might summarize these as “more predictable costs” — to design a system around a substrate whose “immune system” won’t constantly be trying to kill the system. Which means either your own hardware, or a “being your own model” inference platform like RunPod/Vast/etc.

(Now consider that there are a bunch of fly-by-night BYO-model hosted inference platforms, that are charging unsustainable flat-rate subscription prices for use of their hardware. Why do these exist? Should be obvious now, given the facts already laid out: these are people doing TOU-violating things who decided to build their own cluster for doing them… and then realized that they had spare capacity on that cluster that they could sell.)