There are a number of use cases where sending the contents of your context and prompts (and the resulting output) to a 3rd party service is off the table as an option, and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty. And not everyone's electricity is equally expensive, I pay about $0.075 USD per kWh. It would for example cost me about $48 a month of electricity (not counting cost of cooling) to run a quad socket Dell R940 for a month.
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That's an unusually low electric rate for the US - way below the lowest state average which is Idaho at 12.4 cents. It's certainly possible that you are getting 7.5 cents including delivery, but I've had friends say that they're "getting 13 cents per kWh" here in Massachusetts, but that's just the supply rate and the delivery is another ~18 cents.
There are parts of states like Grant County Washington that have cheap hydro power, but it's very rare for power to be that cheap in the US. Even if this applies to you, it won't apply to the vast majority of people on here who will have electric rates 2-4x higher.
Average electric rates by region:
New England 28.1 cents
Mid Atlantic 25.1 cents
East North Central 20.8 cents
West North Central 14.8 cents
South Atlantic 16.1 cents
East South Central 15.5 cents
Mountain 14.6 cents
Pacific Contiguous 26.1 cents
Pacific Noncontiguous 42.1 cents
> Pacific Contiguous 26.1 cents
This is a bit misleading, because it's combining the 50 cents/kWh from California with 15ish cents/kWh in Oregon and Washington. Seattle City Light, for example, charges 13.38 cents/kWh on flat rate pricing, and far less with time-of-use billing (8 cents/kWh on off-peak).
I'm actually getting 11 cents in winter, 13 in summer, but my utility company is a co-op. Average for my state is I think 19 cents.
I think you can get down to around 8 if you are signed up for an interruptible load, or a dedicated off peak load, depending on the company, but yeah, standard rates aren't that low.
If you run off solar with battery backup, you can achieve lower than those rates! Look at Time of Use rates. The super off peak rates instantly become the max price point once you pair TOU with Solar + battery.
A lot of people quoting low rates are also just referring to their off-peak rate. This is pretty common in EV discussions. It's not exactly a fair argument there, either, because the flip side of having an off-peak rate is that the on-peak rate is usually quite a lot higher. So the true effective rate is a bit higher, somewhere in the middle depending on usage pattern.
It's easy to have your EV only charge off-peak, though. It's just a setting.
My point is that the tradeoff to get off-peak pricing is that on-peak is way, way more expensive. So you can charge the EV off-peak to maximize the savings, but everything else you do during on-peak time costs way more.
Using myself as an example:
I adjust my A/C to run outside of 5pm-9pm (peak) if at all possible, we try to avoid pointless high-draw usage during that same window, and both of our EVs hold off charging until after 9pm.
My rate from 5pm-9pm is 0.43/kWh. My rate after 9pm is 0.09/kWh. The flat rate alternative, if I did not want to worry about time of day, would be 0.21/kWh. These prices are all-in, including transmission and distribution/whatever.
It would be dishonest to say that my EVs only cost me 0.09/kWh to operate, which on it's face is a claim to paying over 50% less. In reality, time of day pricing typically saves me somewhere between 10% and 15% in an average month compared with flat rate.
Not the parent, but here is one location that has rates in that range in the U.S.
I'm in Arkansas and get rates fairly similar as quoted.
From my last bill
> KWH USAGE 2590 - $183.37
There's a base customer cost of $18 on top of that, but yeah ~$0.077/kWh taxes included.
Is that for a month or a year?
My monthly bills are similar to this, near Arkansas.
Last one was $212 for 2,146 kwh between June 8 - July 6 (28 Days)
I pay a little less than that though I’m limited to 50 kW average load. Delivery is a fixed monthly fee, about $10 USD/month.
To me (EU) that seems like a pretty generous limit. A normal house connection here is limited to 8kW single phase or 17kW for a 3 phase connection. You can get more, but that is very uncommon and gets expensive quickly
Nashville Electric Service rates are 12.0 cents / kWh. Flat rate, no peak or off peak rates for residential.
Fort Collins, CO is probably where that rate is. I don't know of anywhere cheaper for residential electric.
> That's an unusually low electric rate for the US
What about buying your own solar panels and batteries?
They are most likely not based in the US, but converting to USD to make comparison easier.
I am not in Quebec but Quebec hydro rate D for standard residential would be one example of around what I pay.
https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
Another example would be Manitoba hydro
All figures in Canadian currency
Specifying USD is indeed often a service usually offered by people born elsewhere for people born elsewhere. Americans seem rarely know about these mysterious places, where bills can come in all sorts of funny sizes and colours. (kind of joking)
As someone who has worked in two industries that are at the maximal end of data sensitivity and privacy this comes across as a tinfoil hat issue not a real business requirement. In such cases we've always found ways to trade dollars for the privacy we need without having to run our own inference at excruciating slow speeds.
Do you mean by trading dollars for the privacy you need as:
a) Contracting with a third-party independent inference provider who will run your choice of model on fast hardware that they own, with all appropriate data security/privacy/contractual/compliance protection in place
or
b) Contracting with the original creators of the model to run inference via their API and with assurances that all the same data protection is in place
or
c) Spending the money to buy your own inference hardware to run it on something you fully own/control at proper usable speeds?
Edit: Everything I've been writing in this thread is mostly within the context of being able to evaluate K3 and its usefulness to be self-hosted as a preliminary proof of concept or test of feasibility of a new thing, such as on <$20,000 of server hardware, before proceeding to spend 300-400k on GPU-related hardware, or external third party services/ongoing billing.
A) is very doable with e.g. Amazon Bedrock.
They'll give you HIPAA compliance, they even have a data center for US government classified data, they can give you European data sovereignty. And with OpenAI and Anthropic models to boot, you don't even have to settle for open weights.
What kind of privacy needs do you really have beyond that?
It is not my use case but given recent political developments in international relations caused by the executive branch of the US government, off the top of my head, I could think of a lot of European or Canadian firms for which that would not be an option. No matter what they might promise about European sovereignty. For a good 'ol patriotic US domestic company? Sure.
It's also worth considering what you are actually paying for. And it's not keeping the data private, it's taking the blame when there is a breach. Same reason companies hire big consulting firms whenever they need to make an important but possibly risky decision.
There are regulated sectors in countries where data sovereignty is important enough that the sector sticks to air-gapped on-prem hardware and does not use cloud services at all. They have the dollars to pay for more than what it would cost to run on the Cloud.
Having worked in / adjacent several such industries, a lot of the question depends on scale.
A trillion-dollar business can easily trade dollars for the privacy. A business with $1M to spend won't even get a phone call with OpenAI or Anthropic, who were the only* previous players in town for doing this.
Worst-case example: Bootstrapped startup working in military.
It's also the case that an open model enables many more intermediate-cost solutions. E.g. providers certified for specific applications, on-prem rentals, etc.
* Omitting Azure, which gives some privacy for some $$$ on their models, but not at the level of high-security.
> Worst-case example: Bootstrapped startup working in military.
That's the easiest case.
AWS Bedrock models running in AWS Secret Cloud for Industry. (I really have no affiliation with them, I'm just like... this is a completely solved problem, why do people think this is hard and requires on-prem hardware?)
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-secret-cloud-for-in...
I'm with GP that these are tinfoil hat concerns, when there are solutions to all of these, unless you're perhaps in some country with very specific needs beyond things like European sovereignty or US military secrets (like a non-US defense concern).
> Omitting Azure, which gives some privacy for some $$$ on their models, but not at the level of high-security.
If I were ranking third parties on their ability to safely handle my data without compromising it, I would rank Anthropic pretty low for things like Fable (where they more or less promise that they will misuse my data), but I want Azure pretty low in the sense that I fully expect them to be compromised.
I would tend to trust Amazon to avoid being compromised.
Interesting. So nobody would have had a problem with you running stuff on Chinese AI providers?
I have some inference I simply don't want to run on OAI, Anthropic, or Google because I don't want to run afoul of their "rules" and end up with a banned account, and this situation is only getting worse when it comes to doing fairly basic tasks like trying to secure your app against security problems.
Great, so the other member of the set matters for you more than cost.
Do you actually need to run the state of art model at 5 tokens per second instead of a qwen or whatever 7b or 30b model at 100 tokens per second?
Do I really need to? No, not really. The 27B full density, 35B MoE, 70B and 122B models I have in use get me 95% of the way there on a lot of things. Particularly when dealing with languages and systems where I have at least an intermediate level of knowledge on, to know whether something is going down a dead end, using a wrong method, metaphorically chasing its tail, or is producing valid output.
On the other hand, would it be cool to also have a really big thing as an ancillary tool that I could throw a request into opencode before going to bed, let it crank away and take a look at what it's done 7 hours later? Yeah, particularly if I (very much an unknown quantity at this time) could be confident that it builds high quality, syntax valid, appropriately commented and not absurd code.
>Do you actually need to run the state of art model at 5 tokens per second instead of a qwen or whatever 7b or 30b model at 100 tokens per second?
Some people like doing things they want to do. Do I actually need to buy expensive pigments from europe to make paintings of flowers? My camera produces a much more accurate representation.
Very good description of it. It does seem like a bit of a rhetorical question to ask a forum that has a very high population of Linux and BSD users why they might desire to have the option to do something themselves rather than relying on an external packaged ready to go product.
The whole mentality of thinking one knows better than another about what they need causes infinitely more problems than it solves.
It's completely academic. At 5tok/s you can process 13 MTok per month at concurrency 1. I use 5 BILLION tokens per week when coding.
Yeah. At 5 tok/second, you're talking about around $195 worth of output tokens per month. There is no way I can run a usable K3 model for $195 a month of capex, opex, or any-kind-of-ex.
Qwen 3.6 is another matter. Paying provider rates for the amount I run locally would put me in the thousands of dollars. So that's very practical to buy a Macbook instead, plus an RTX card, and so on.
can send safely context if there’s confidential computing ala my site https://trustedrouter.com/
How do you prove you are running exclusively on Nitro enclave instances or GCP confidential spaces?
Seems clear from their website?
1. Their API server provide an attestation JWT. This JWT is signed by Google's private key. 2. The attestation has details on the running container. I suppose the container host is a Google-provided distro and Google's signer will verify that the OS is theirs and up-to-date. 3. They could've proxy the attestation. To prove this is not the case, the field eat_nonce include the TLS certificate fingerprint, which should match the API server you're connecting to. I suppose you will need to pull their container and verify from the source that the container itself generate the private key, it never leaves the container, and the container has no way to run arbitrary code such as SSH or vulnerabilities.
Is your local compute airgapped?
There are a number of use cases where sending the contents of your context and prompts (and the resulting output) to a 3rd party service is off the table as an option, and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty.
Are there? At the highest levels of defense and law, AWS and Azure are used.
Having tried selling some of these entities on doing things in-house, there seems to be little interest.
> Are there? At the highest levels of defense and law, AWS and Azure are used.
This is certainly true if the user is an American company. You could look at the European initiatives to run this stuff on hardware they own in facilities they own and control within the borders of Europe for a counter-example.
Such as: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=schwarz+s...
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/04/government-turns-to-german-...
Yeah, true European cloud providers for these kinds of things seem to be behind, and a lot of the ones offering data compliance at the level of AWS are small enough that it's a bit harder to trust they'll be around and will keep their promises.
Hopefully that changes!
> I pay about $0.075 USD per kWh
Around here electricity companies quote prices like yours but that is supply only while transmission, taxes, and fees are again as much on top. Is that really all inclusive?
Which are those use cases, considering that the hypothetical server, as described by the GP, is also extremely slow (4/6 hours for a response)?
>and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty
People should always compromise speed for data sovereignty! Who said: that in this digital day and age, information about money is more important than money!