One-page reference: the two gates (licence first, VRAM second), the five-model licence-and-VRAM table, the honest per-clip GPU-clock math, the ~5,000-clip/month break-even, and the three non-price reasons to self-host (data residency, volume, licence + fine-tuning).
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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
This self-hosted versus API decision sheet for open video models covers the licence and VRAM gates, per-clip GPU math, the monthly break-even and non-price reasons to self-host. Volume 7 covers this topic in depth: serving with vLLM, Triton and TensorRT, infrastructure choices, cost per stream-hour and regulation such as C2PA. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
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