You and a handful of friends buy one serious machine, put it in a datacenter, and all use it. Your data never leaves it. Nothing is filtered. There is no per-token meter. And at the end, you own the hardware.
None of them are savings. If price is the only thing you care about, use the API — we will say so on every page of this site.
Every prompt, document and answer stays on a machine your group owns. 44% of organisations name data privacy as their top barrier to using AI at all. On your own box the question does not arise.
Open-weight models, your rules. Nothing is refused by someone else's policy and no model is quietly swapped underneath you between one week and the next.
One purchase, then a flat monthly split between you. Thinking harder about a problem costs nothing extra, which changes how people actually work.
Three years of renting leaves you with receipts. Three years of owning leaves you with hardware you can sell, upgrade, or move somewhere cheaper.
We are the wedding planner and the property manager of personal datacenters. You bring the group; we do everything between that and a machine you can log into.
Three friends or thirty. We help you get to a real per-person number before anyone commits to anything.
The model you want to run sets the video memory, and that sets the hardware. We source it from the vendors who actually build these boxes.
One small member-managed company per cluster holds title to the hardware. Members hold shares of it. One member, one vote on upgrades, exits and everything else. Buyout rules are written before the money moves.
Each member's buy-in flows through an approved payment processor or licensed escrow into the group company's own account. We never hold a cent of it.
Rack space at an existing datacenter, power contract, assembly, and the serving stack: member accounts, private API keys, usage dashboard, fair-share scheduling.
Monthly operations, monitoring and software. Colocation and power are passed through at cost. You own the machine the whole time — including the day you sell it.
The model you want to run sets the video memory you need, and that sets everything else. Pick the smallest machine that runs what you actually use.
Card prices moved 55% in a single quarter in 2026 and Apple pulled its 512GB configuration. Every quote we give a group carries a short validity window for exactly that reason, and pools are designed to close quickly.
Our audience runs these numbers themselves. So here they are, including the row where we come last.
| Path | Real 2026 cost | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Cheap API (DeepSeek) | $0.14 in / $0.28 out per M tokens | Cheapest, by a mile Filtered, metered, and your data leaves you. |
| Pricier APIs (Kimi, GLM, 405B-class) | ~$1–3.50 per M output | Owning gets cost-competitive above roughly 3–8 billion tokens a month. |
| Renting 8× H100 around the clock | ~$11,700 / month | Rent Buying the same used server (~$160–200k) pays for itself in 14–18 months. |
| Hetzner flat server, split 5 ways | ~€178 (~$193) each / month | Rent The easiest option there is. Five years is €10,680 spent and nothing owned. |
| Group-owned machine | Starter ~$275–450/mo · Frontier rack ~$4,200/mo | Own Flat, private, unfiltered, and there is hardware at the end. |
Owning beats renting above roughly 50% sustained usage.
Owning beats the expensive APIs above roughly 3–8 billion tokens a month.
Owning never beats the cheapest APIs. Not at any volume we can find.
Imagine how much money you would save if, rather than renting a pod 24/7 for just yourself, you pooled your cash with some other people who also wanted to use those models.r/LocalLLaMA · December 2023
Would it be worth it for say 4 or 5 people to split the cost if I could provide free data center hosting?r/LocalLLaMA · March 2025
I wish I had friends that were actually into LLMs… I'd buy one and split the cost with 2-3 other friends.r/LocalLLaMA · May 2025
r/LocalLLaMA is at 794,000 members and grew 55% in a year. Ollama is at roughly 9 million users. Volunteer collectives like AI Horde have run shared GPU clusters since 2022. The appetite is not in question — the organising is.
That is all we need to tell you which machine you are looking at and what it costs each of you. No payment, no commitment — we are matching real groups to real hardware.