Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
3 days ago
- #Cost Comparison
- #OpenRouter
- #Apple Silicon
- Electricity cost for an M5 Macbook Pro under load is around $0.02 per hour.
- Hardware cost per hour varies from $0.049 to $0.164 depending on lifespan (3 to 10 years).
- Token generation ranges from 10-40 tokens per second, costing $0.40 to $4.79 per million tokens.
- OpenRouter offers Gemma4 31b at $0.38-$0.50 per million tokens, making it about 1/3 the price of local inference.
- Local inference is slower than cloud, with OpenRouter achieving 3-7x higher token speeds.
- For employees, salary costs dwarf token generation expenses, making cloud services like Anthropic more economical.