Training ROI
When does the
card pay for itself?
If you fine-tune on your own hardware, every run is “free” once the GPU is bought. We estimate the hours a run takes, price the electricity and the cloud alternative, and tell you how many runs it takes to break even.
Real run hours
6·N·D compute, ~40% MFU — editable if you know yours.
Per-run cost
Electricity owned vs the same run rented on cloud.
Break-even
The run count where owning overtakes renting.
Own vs rent, run by run
The recoup curve.
Owning starts at the sticker price and inches up by the electricity per run. Renting starts at zero and climbs by the cloud cost each run. Where they cross, the card has paid for itself.
How we estimate a run
Assumptions on the table.
Compute
6 × params × tokens FLOPs — the standard forward + backward cost for a dense transformer step.
Time
FLOPs ÷ (peak BF16 × MFU), MFU ≈ 40%. Peak TFLOPS are indicative — real throughput shifts with batch, sequence length and framework, so the field is editable.
Money
Electricity TDP × 1.3 × hrs × rate; cloud $/hr × hrs. Break-even = price ÷ (cloud − power) per run.
Before you commit the capital
Buy the card that earns it back.
ROI only matters if the card fits the job. The Workspace ranks GPUs for your model, then lands on buy-vs-rent — this page proves the payback.
Evidence & method
How this calculation works
Estimates a fine-tuning run's hours, electricity and cloud cost, then shows how many runs it takes for owning the GPU to beat renting it.
Data sources
- NVIDIA, AMD & Intel GPU documentation (TDP, price class)
- Cloud provider pricing
- Bitpute Methodology
Assumptions
- Energy = TDP × system-overhead factor × hours/day × 30.4 × months × rate
- Default utilisation 8 hours/day; electricity rate and hours are adjustable
- Purchase price amortised over the period; cloud-rent equivalent at the provider hourly rate
- Excludes cooling, networking, maintenance and datacentre cost beyond the TDP overhead factor
Limitations
- Electricity rates, utilisation and cloud prices vary widely by region, provider and contract
- Real power draw depends on workload, not just rated TDP
- Prices are indicative and change frequently
- Estimates are for comparison, not financial advice
Data status: Hardware specs — vendor documentation. Prices & rates — indicative and user-adjustable.
Related
Why does this estimate differ from other calculators?
- Different electricity rates and utilisation assumptions
- Cloud pricing variance by provider and region
- Power measured at the wall vs at the card
- Amortisation period and residual value
- Rounding