Self-hosting means you deploy and operate the model yourself — your servers or cloud, your GPUs. It keeps data in-house, removes per-call fees at scale, and avoids vendor lock-in, but you own the uptime, scaling, and upgrade burden.
The book · Volume 7 of 7
AI for Video: A Complete Guide to Intelligence in Video Products: From Real-Time Pipelines and Agents to Serving, Cost, Compliance, and Verticals
Self-hosting looks cheaper than an API until you count GPUs, on-call time and idle capacity. Volume 7 covers self-hosting in detail as a serving decision: inference infrastructure with vLLM, Triton and TensorRT, cost per stream-hour, the break-even against vendor APIs and compliance reasons to keep data in-house. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Deciding whether to self-host AI models or stay on a vendor API?
Give us your monthly volume and data constraints, and we will compare self-hosting with APIs and show the break-even point in dollars. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
