The break-even point between paying per-token API fees and running a dedicated RTX 5060 Ti 16GB on our UK dedicated GPU hosting arrives earlier than most teams realise. This post gives you a reusable formula, a volume lookup table, and two worked examples so you can calculate the crossover yourself.
Contents
- The formula
- Monthly cost by volume
- MAU crossover thresholds
- Worked example: SaaS chat
- Worked example: batch processing
The formula
The arithmetic is a single equation. Let H be your fixed monthly hosting cost and R the blended API rate (input plus output, weighted by your own ratio). Then:
Break-even tokens per month = H ÷ R.
For a 5060 Ti 16GB at roughly £300/month (~$380), and a blended GPT-4o-mini rate of $0.30/M tokens (assuming a 2:1 input/output split), break-even sits at approximately 1.27B tokens per month. Against Claude Haiku at $2.50/M blended, break-even drops to around 150M tokens/month.
On the capacity side, one 5060 Ti sustains about 720 tokens/second aggregate on Llama 3.1 8B FP8 at batch 32, which works out to 1.87B tokens across a fully-utilised month. You have headroom above break-even on most competitive APIs.
Monthly cost by volume
| Monthly tokens | GPT-4o-mini | Claude Haiku | GPT-4o | 5060 Ti dedicated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100k | $0.03 | $0.25 | $0.63 | $380 |
| 1M | $0.30 | $2.50 | $6.25 | $380 |
| 10M | $3 | $25 | $63 | $380 |
| 100M | $30 | $250 | $625 | $380 |
| 500M | $150 | $1,250 | $3,125 | $380 |
| 1B | $300 | $2,500 | $6,250 | $380 |
| 2B | $600 | $5,000 | $12,500 | $380 (at capacity) |
At 100M tokens/month you are still cheaper on GPT-4o-mini. At 500M you are breaking even against Haiku, and at 2B you are winning against every major API by more than an order of magnitude.
MAU crossover thresholds
Translating token volume into product metrics, assume 5 messages per active user per day and 500 tokens per exchange:
- Break-even vs GPT-4o-mini: approximately 17,000 MAU.
- Break-even vs Claude Haiku: approximately 2,000 MAU.
- Break-even vs GPT-4o: approximately 800 MAU.
- Capacity ceiling on one 5060 Ti: approximately 25,000 MAU.
If your product is already past 2,000 paying users and you are on a Haiku-class model, the 5060 Ti is probably cheaper from day one.
Worked example: SaaS chat
A B2B SaaS has 10,000 DAU who send 5 messages of 500 tokens each. That produces 25M input tokens/day and 8M output tokens/day; 750M input and 240M output monthly. Against GPT-4o-mini ($0.15 input, $0.60 output) the bill is roughly $113 + $144 = $257/month. Against Claude Haiku ($1 input, $4 output) it is $750 + $960 = $1,710/month. The 5060 Ti at $380 wins clearly on Haiku, loses marginally on GPT-4o-mini – so the model choice matters as much as volume. See our OpenAI comparison for the full detail.
Worked example: batch processing
Nightly pipeline summarises 100,000 documents of 2,000 tokens each – 200M tokens per night, roughly 6B monthly. Output is typically 10-20% of input, call it 1B output tokens. Against GPT-4o-mini, that is $900 + $600 = $1,500/month. The 5060 Ti at $380 is an easy win, and it doubles as your embeddings, reranking and Whisper host. For the fuller ROI picture, see our ROI analysis.
Run the break-even before you order
We help UK teams pick the right tier and model for their actual volume. UK dedicated hosting.
Order the RTX 5060 Ti 16GBSee also: vs OpenAI API cost, ROI analysis, 5060 Ti for SaaS RAG, concurrent user capacity, max throughput.
