Should you self-host inference?

Logged at IST: 2026-07-16 20:03 IST

What it is: Superlinked’s long-form argument for when self-hosting model inference becomes cheaper or strategically better than renting APIs.

Gist: The article’s practical answer is hybrid: rent frontier APIs for low-volume, spiky, or hardest-reasoning traffic, but self-host steady high-volume workloads once a GPU stays busy enough. The useful details are the break-even framing around sustained utilization, the claim that many enterprise tasks are already well-served by sub-40B open models, and the systems argument that the real challenge is not just serving one model but routing, batching, packing, and operating many small models efficiently on shared hardware.

Newsletter angle: Good operational piece because it moves the self-hosting question away from ideology and toward utilization, workload shape, model specialization, and control-plane design.