Self-hosting AI does not save money, and I do it anyway

Hi folks, I'm a long-time lurker and big fan of this subreddit and a massive self-hosting fan (also outside of AI).

I doubt many people will disagree with me here because I see the same arguments being made in many posts. However, I thought it might be interesting to share anyway. I wrote down why self-hosting AI does not save money: https://www.nijho.lt/post/self-hosting-ai-is-not-cheaper/

EDIT: didn't think this would be so controversial 😅 I do say explicitly in my blog post "I would never send 200 GB of email, my messages, and my location history to an API, zero data retention or not".

EDIT 2: Comparing $200 sub with Opus 5.5 or Astra with Qwen 3.8 27B is not apples to apples.