Self-hosting GLM and DeepSeek payback: it all depends on which cloud pricing you're replacing

如果我买显卡自托管 GLM 和 DeepSeek，到底要几年才能回本？

This piece runs three cost scenarios with real benchmark data. Against cold-start API list prices, an 8×H200 node for GLM-5.2 pays back in ~1.15 years, and dual RTX PRO 6000 for DeepSeek-V4-Flash in ~1.77 years. With Agent workloads and 92% prompt cache hit rates, GLM on 8×B300 pays back in as little as 2.3 months because Z.AI's cache pricing is relatively high; DeepSeek's cache pricing is so cheap that payback stretches to 10.5 months. The worst case: replacing per-seat subscriptions—at equivalent quota, the GLM node takes 22–27 years. The real driver isn't GPU cost, it's your workload's context reuse rate and which cloud billing model you're displacing.

Why it matters: A first-person cost analysis with concrete numbers, comparing self-hosting payback periods for GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash across different scenarios. Hardware specs, electricity rates, and throughput data are all provided — not hand-waving. Not scored higher because it's a ...