When a Lausanne fintech burned through CHF 4,200 in a single day after a GDPR‑triggered API outage, its CTO realized the hidden price of every megabyte sent to a US‑hosted LLM.
1. Direct infrastructure spend – the headline numbers
Hardware & electricity
Running an inference box on‑premise isn’t cheap, but the numbers are transparent. A single 4‑GPU node equipped with NVIDIA H100 cards draws roughly 3 kW under load. At today’s Swiss electricity price of CHF 0.35 /kWh that’s CHF 2,520 per year, or about CHF 210 per month in power alone. The hardware amortisation—assuming a three‑year depreciation—adds CHF 2,590 per month. Together they land at CHF 2,800 / month for a fully staffed node.
Managed service licences
