Break-even index / Mini-PC / Claude Sonnet 4.6 / Rhode Island
Will a Mini-PC / iGPU box beat Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Rhode Island?
Your rig pays for itself in 6 months — after that you bank roughly $111/mo versus the cloud. Clear win.
How to read it: OWN — the rig pays for itself inside 18 months. HYBRID — break-even lands between 18 and 36 months; real, but slow. RENT — it never pays off before the hardware is due for replacement. Every formula and threshold is public on the methodology page.
The numbers
| Build cost (Mini-PC / iGPU box) | $750 ($600–$900) |
|---|---|
| Hardware amortized (3 yr) | $20.83/mo |
| Electricity in Rhode Island ($0.301/kWh) | $3.12/mo (10.35 kWh) |
| Local total cost of ownership | $23.95/mo |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 at the same usage | $135/mo |
| Break-even | about 6 months |
Assumes the "coding assistant" preset: ~15M tokens/month, 3 h/day active, 5 h/day idle. Claude Sonnet 4.6 priced at $3/M in, $15/M out (verified 2026-07-05). Rig ceiling: 7B-13B models only — but honestly good ones now. Jargon: VRAM is the GPU memory that decides which models fit; Q4 is 4-bit quantization — a smaller, faster copy of a model with a slight quality cost.
See your verdict — then tweak every number →