How much does it cost to run production AI on the cheap LLM stack?

Total monthly cost ranges from $0-3 for light usage (100 calls/day), $2-8 for medium (500 calls/day), to $5-15 for heavy usage (2000 calls/day). At the same volumes, pure-API spend would be roughly $40, $200, and $800 respectively, a 20-50x cost reduction.

How many free requests does the Gemini CLI free tier give per day?

The Gemini CLI free tier provides 1,000 free requests per day for general tasks like Q&A, summarization, and simple coding, which works out to about 30,000 free calls per month. Note that Google logs free-tier prompts for model improvement, so you should not send proprietary code or PII.

How much cheaper is the DeepSeek API than Claude Sonnet?

DeepSeek-V4 costs $0.27 per million input tokens versus $3 per million for Claude Sonnet, roughly 1/10 the price, while the code benchmark gap to Claude Sonnet averages only about 5%. Off-peak hours (UTC 16:30-00:30) add a further 50% discount.

What hardware do you need to run Ollama models locally?

8 GB RAM runs Llama 3.2 3B at 20+ tokens/sec for autocomplete and drafts, 16 GB RAM runs Qwen 3 Coder 14B at 15 tokens/sec for production coding, and 32 GB RAM runs Llama 3.3 70B Q4 at 8 tokens/sec for Claude Sonnet-class quality. Local inference is free with no rate limits, costing only electricity.

When should you upgrade beyond the cheap LLM stack?

Upgrade when you need latency under 500ms (add Claude or GPT-5 for the hot path), when compliance requires US-only data providers (drop DeepSeek and Gemini), when bulk workloads need an SLA (add a managed LiteLLM gateway), or when you want full observability (add Portkey). The stack is the floor for scaling spend deliberately, not the ceiling.

The Cheap LLM Stack 2026: How to Run Production AI on $0-15/Month Using Free Tiers and Token Compression

5-component stack to run real AI workloads on $0-15/month: Ollama local + DeepSeek API + Gemini free tier + RTK compression + 9Router orchestration. Real cost math, model picks per task type, assembly order.

Python
Docker
Go
Rust
MIT
更新于 2026-05-21

Pair this collection with Self-Hosted AI Coding Workflow if you want the full coding stack — they share Ollama + 9Router + RTK as a foundation.

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