Return on investment for a dedicated RTX 5060 Ti 16GB on our UK hosting is not only token-cost replacement. This analysis walks through 12-month TCO, engineer-hours saved, and the 5-year depreciation angle so you can build the business case for finance.
Contents
- 12-month TCO by team size
- Direct savings
- Soft benefits and engineer-hours
- 5-year depreciation view
- Risks and when it does not pay back
12-month TCO by team size
Assumes each engineer triggers roughly 8M tokens/month of internal tooling (code assistants, docs, tests) and each team runs one customer-facing inference workload at a base of 300M tokens/month plus 50M per 10 engineers. API baseline uses a blended $0.50/M (mid-tier Claude Haiku / GPT-4o class).
| Team size | Monthly tokens | API annual cost | 5060 Ti hosting annual | 12-month saving |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 engineers | 340M | $2,040 | $4,560 | -$2,520 (API wins) |
| 20 engineers | 460M | $2,760 | $4,560 | -$1,800 (API wins) |
| 50 engineers | 640M | $3,840 | $4,560 | -$720 (roughly flat) |
| 100 engineers | 940M | $5,640 | $4,560 | +$1,080 (dedicated wins) |
| 100 eng + customer LLM | 2.5B | $15,000 | $4,560 | +$10,440 |
| 100 eng + RAG at 5B tokens | 5B | $30,000 | $4,560 | +$25,440 |
Break-even on engineer-assist alone lands at about 80 engineers. With any customer-facing inference at 1B tokens or more, the dedicated card pays back inside quarter two.
Direct savings
- API token cost replaced by a fixed £300/month fee.
- No overage or surge pricing during traffic spikes – the card cost is the same at 10% or 90% utilisation.
- Free co-hosted services: embeddings (BGE-M3 ~2,000 docs/sec), reranker (~1,400 q/sec), Whisper Turbo (55x real-time) all run on the same GPU.
- Bundled UK bandwidth – no data egress fees on traffic leaving the server.
Soft benefits and engineer-hours
Soft benefits are easy to dismiss but often dominate the ROI spreadsheet for a 20-50 person engineering org.
| Benefit | Estimated hours/month saved | Value at £75/hour |
|---|---|---|
| No rate-limit escalations or quota requests | 4 | £300 |
| No model deprecation migrations | 6 (avg over year) | £450 |
| Data residency / compliance reviews avoided | 8 | £600 |
| Faster iteration on prompt/model tuning | 10 | £750 |
That is roughly £2,100/month of soft value alone – seven times the hosting fee. See also our startup MVP guide and tokens-per-watt analysis.
5-year depreciation view
SaaS subscriptions expense 100% of spend every year forever. Dedicated hosting is operational spend against an asset that keeps delivering. Looking at five years:
- 5060 Ti hosting at $380/month × 60 months = $22,800 total opex.
- Equivalent API spend at 1B tokens/month on Haiku: $150,000 – a 6.6x multiplier.
- By year two the 5060 Ti budget has often moved down a tier or sideways to a newer Blackwell – the card does not get more expensive with age.
Risks and when it does not pay back
Honest caveats: under 500M tokens/month and no compliance pressure, API-first is genuinely cheaper and lower-ops. Ops overhead is real – expect 4-8 engineer hours per month for monitoring, updates and occasional driver upgrades. Model-generation lag matters – you need to plan upgrades to a bigger card when your model outgrows 16 GB.
Build the ROI case in a spreadsheet, then order
Fixed-price dedicated hosting with measurable economics. UK dedicated hosting.
Order the RTX 5060 Ti 16GBSee also: break-even calculator, vs OpenAI API, for SaaS RAG, when to upgrade.
