The open source AI revolution has democratized access to sophisticated language models. However, analysis of 47 enterprise deployments reveals organizations underestimate true costs by 340-580%. This article dissects hidden cost categories including infrastructure (50K-500K initial), personnel (380K annually minimum), and operational overhead (2. 3x initial cost over three years). Break-even occurs only at 50+ million tokens daily.
Oleh Ivchenko (Sat,) studied this question.