That's a silly reason. For non-agent use cases what kind of utilization are you going to average on your own GPU, 5-10%? And that's without batching.

Even with overhead and scaling for peak use and a large profit margin, any company with an ounce of competition will be vastly cheaper than self-hosting. And for models you can run yourself, there will be plenty of competition.

I think you are calculating with current prices. Try to extrapolate the price in one year, seeing the current trends instead.

Extrapolating current trends, I expect API prices to drop significantly for a given measure of 'intelligence'.

The models I could reasonably run at home aren't experiencing big price hikes, as far as I'm aware.

Price is a reason to escape many proprietary models, but not so much a reason to self host. Buying an expensive GPU mostly for AI purposes is not likely to save money unless you load it all day long.