Free Models Still Have TCO

The teach TCO asks what the model costs to own, not what it costs to download. For open-source AI, that distinction is the difference between a serious business case and a budget surprise. Count at least six buckets. Infrastructure covers GPUs, CPUs, memory, storage, networking, and scaling headroom. Setup covers deployment, quantization, serving stack, security review, and integration. Operations covers monitoring, logging, evaluation refreshes, incident response, and on-call time. Maintenance covers patches, model updates, dependency changes, and regression testing. Risk covers downtime, data leakage, poor outputs, and support burden. Exit covers migration, decommissioning, and switching costs. The comparison should be…

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