Policy · Last reviewed 2026-07-05
The honesty policy
This site contains affiliate links. Sites with affiliate links have a well-earned reputation for telling you to buy things. This page explains, in plain terms, how we arranged our incentives so that lying to you would cost us money — and how you can check our work rather than take our word for it.
The conflict of interest, stated bluntly
Nearly every "should I buy a GPU?" calculator on the internet has the same business model: it earns a commission when you buy hardware, and nothing when you don't. Nobody has to falsify a number for that to warp the result. You just pick a flattering cloud baseline, round the electricity down, stretch the amortization out, and the math tells you to buy the GPU. Every time. What a coincidence.
A calculator that only gets paid when you say yes isn't a calculator. It's a brochure doing an impression of one.
Our fix: every verdict pays
We inverted the structure. This site gives one of three verdicts, and each one has its own way of keeping the lights on:
- OWN — links to the hardware, via retail affiliate programs.
- RENT — referral links to cloud APIs and hourly GPU rentals.
- HYBRID — both, because that's what a hybrid setup needs.
So no verdict is a lost sale, and the math has nothing to gain by flattering any answer. We are the rare affiliate site that is genuinely delighted to tell you not to buy a $1,500 graphics card — that verdict pays us too, just less dramatically.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Same $1,200 used-3090 rig, same 15M tokens a month of coding work, same national-average electricity ($0.1883/kWh, verified 2026-07-05). The only thing that changes is which cloud model you'd honestly otherwise pay for:
| Your cloud baseline | Cloud / mo | Break-even | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 ($3 / $15 per MTok) | $135 | 9.5 months | OWN |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 ($1 / $5) | $45 | 33.4 months | HYBRID |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash ($0.14 / $0.28) | $3.15 | never | RENT |
Engine output, verified 2026-07-05. The rig's own cost is $42.37/mo either way — $33.33 amortization plus $9.04 electricity. Full formulas on the methodology page.
That third row is the one an affiliate-funded calculator structurally cannot show you. Ours shows it constantly. Here is the actual verdict the engine returns for that scenario:
On cost alone, this never pays off — the cloud bill ($3.15/mo) is at or below your electricity bill ($9.04/mo). Buy it for sovereignty, not savings.
The ordering guarantee
The verdict is computed in your browser, client-side, before any product link renders. Links follow the recommendation; they never shape it. There is no server deciding what you see, no A/B test nudging you toward the expensive answer, and no way for a retailer to buy a better verdict, because the entire engine is a single public file: /js/engine.mjs. Pure functions, no dependencies, about 200 lines. If you find the thumb on the scale, tell us — we'll be embarrassed and grateful in that order.
What we earn, exactly
Hardware (OWN and HYBRID verdicts): we participate in Amazon Associates and similar retail affiliate programs (Newegg, B&H Photo). If you buy through those links, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Cloud and rentals (RENT and HYBRID verdicts): we use referral links for OpenRouter, RunPod, Vast.ai, and Lambda. Same deal — a referral credit or commission, no markup to you.
Every affiliate and referral link on this site is marked rel="sponsored", so both you and the search engines know which links pay us. Prices shown next to those links are indicative and dated — always check the live page, because prices drift and your bill wins every argument.
Sponsorships
We may run sponsored comparisons or placements. When we do, they are visibly labeled as sponsored, kept out of the verdict logic entirely, and subject to one non-negotiable rule: money never touches the math. A sponsor can buy a labeled box on a page. A sponsor cannot buy a verdict, a threshold, a default, or a data-table entry. The engine file is public precisely so this promise is checkable rather than decorative.
Privacy
Short version: we don't want your data, and we've built the site so we mostly can't have it.
- No accounts. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to breach.
- No tracking pixels, no ad-network scripts, no fingerprinting.
- All calculations run in your browser. Your usage, your electricity rate, and your hardware plans never leave your machine.
- Sharing a scenario is opt-in, and the share link stores only the numbers — build cost, watts, token volumes, rates — encoded in the URL itself. No database ever sees it. Don't share the link, and the scenario exists nowhere but your screen.
The one thing we sell directly
The Build Plan costs $15, one time. It's a personalized document for your specific scenario: a parts list with current street prices, PSU sizing and wiring notes, quantization settings, the tokens/sec you should realistically expect, and your break-even chart. It exists for people who got an OWN verdict and want the shopping trip done for them.
To be clear about what is not behind that price: the verdict, the full calculator, the sensitivity sliders, and every pre-computed page in the break-even index are free, forever. We will never paywall the answer. We charge for the map, not the destination.
Check us
Honesty claims are cheap; auditable ones aren't. The formulas and data sources live on the methodology page. The reasoning behind the verdicts is written up in our field notes — start with when local actually saves money and whether a used 3090 still pays for itself. Or browse the pre-computed verdicts: a used 3090 vs Claude Sonnet in Texas comes out OWN; a Mac vs DeepSeek V4 Flash in California does not. Both pages are equally happy to exist.
Best of all, run your own numbers. It takes about a minute, and it will happily tell you no.
Questions, corrections, or a thumb-on-the-scale sighting: we want to hear it. This page is reviewed whenever our data tables are refreshed — last verified 2026-07-05.