An operator of a forty person firm asked us this in a parking lot, which is where the good questions get asked. He had been quoted a per seat subscription for everybody in the building and he wanted to know whether buying a machine would be cheaper. He also wanted to know whether we would tell him the truth, given that we set the machine up.
Here is the arithmetic. We have written it so you can put your own numbers into it, because your electricity rate and your seat count are not ours.
The four costs on the owning side
Updated October 2026 with our current prices.
Start with the machine and the setup. Software and setup on a machine you own start from $6,500. We specify the machine and buy it for you at cost, and a complete AI workstation is typically about $7,500. If you already own a workstation that fits, the machine costs you nothing extra. A firm gets its own fixed price in writing after the free AI review.
Then the power, which is the number everybody guesses at. State your assumption and then check it with a meter on the wall. We assume the machine averages 300 watts around the clock, which is a workstation that idles most of the night and works hard for a few hours a day. That is 2,628 kilowatt hours a year. At fourteen cents a kilowatt hour it comes to about $370 a year, so roughly $1,100 over three years. If your rate is twenty cents, make it $1,600. It does not move the answer.
The model itself costs nothing. The models worth running in a small office are open weights, and downloading one costs you the time it takes to download it. This surprises people more than anything else on the list.
Last, somebody in your building has to be the administrator. Adding users, reindexing the documents after a big change, applying an update twice a year. That is a few hours a quarter for a person who is already on payroll, and if there is nobody like that, the care plan is $400 a month. We are leaving it out of the base arithmetic and putting it back in later, because it moves the crossover further than anything else here.
The subscription side
Take $30 per person per month. That is the middle of what the business tiers list at, and it is the number to replace with whatever is on your own invoice. Over thirty six months that is $1,080 per person.
The enterprise tiers are a different number. Twenty five seats of an enterprise AI subscription runs past $20,000 a year, every year, which is about $800 per seat per year, or $2,400 per seat over three years. That is published United States market pricing as of September 2026, and it is worth knowing which tier you are actually being quoted before you compare anything.
The crossover, with the working shown
Three year cost of owning, with a new machine and no care plan:
$6,500 setup + $7,500 machine + $1,100 power = $15,100
Three year cost of subscriptions, per person:
$30 x 36 months = $1,080
Divide one by the other:
$15,100 / $1,080 = 14.0 people
So at the business tier, owning pays for itself somewhere around fourteen regular users. Below that, subscriptions are cheaper. Here is the same sum for the other cases.
| What you buy | Three year cost | Crossover at $30 a seat |
|---|---|---|
| Software and setup on hardware you already own | $7,600 | 7 people |
| Setup plus a new machine bought at cost | $15,100 | 14 people |
| Setup, new machine and the $400 care plan | $29,500 | 27 people |
And the same setup with a new machine, measured against an enterprise seat at $2,400 over three years: $15,100 divided by $2,400 is 6.3, so it crosses over at about six people.
Notice what that table actually says. The crossover is not one number. It moves between six and twenty seven depending on whether you buy a machine, whether you want somebody to call, and which tier you were being quoted in the first place. Anybody who tells you the crossover without asking those three questions is not doing arithmetic.
The word "regular" is doing the work
The crossover is in regular users, not in headcount, and the difference is where most of these decisions go wrong.
That forty person firm in the parking lot does not have forty regular users. It has about a dozen people who would open the thing every day, another ten who would use it in a burst when they are writing something, and eighteen who would never touch it. If he bought forty seats he would be wrong about the subscription cost. If he bought twelve seats, his three year subscription bill is around $13,000, which is less than owning.
So the answer for his firm is buy subscriptions. We told him that in the parking lot and we are telling you now, because that is the arithmetic and it does not care what we sell.
Most small firms are in the same position. If you have fewer than about fourteen people who would use it every day, and no reason beyond cost, buy the subscriptions. They are cheaper, somebody else patches them, and you can stop paying next month.
When owning wins even though the arithmetic says otherwise
Two cases, and neither is really about money.
The first is a confidentiality problem rather than a cost problem. If your alternative is a managed compliance enclave, the reported rate is $150 to $400 per user per month. At $250 a month that is $9,000 per user over three years, and owning pays for itself at two users. Almost everybody who calls us about a private machine is in this position and has not worked out that they are. They think they are shopping on price. They are shopping on where the documents sit.
The second is a workload that is not shaped like seats at all. If you want to run every contract you signed last year through a model overnight, there is no seat count involved, and per token billing on a job like that is its own line item that nobody estimated. A machine you own has no meter, so the overnight job costs you the electricity and nothing else. That is the case where owning is obviously right and the seat arithmetic above is answering the wrong question.
What the arithmetic leaves out, and it is not nothing
The model you own on the day it is installed is the model you own in year three, unless somebody updates it. Updating is free and takes an afternoon, and an afternoon that nobody schedules is an afternoon that does not happen. A subscription hands you the new model without anybody deciding to do it. That is a real advantage and we are not going to pretend it is not.
The hardware is worth less every year. We do not put a depreciation figure in these sums because we have not measured one for this class of machine and we are not going to invent it. Assume the machine is worth something at the end of three years and that the something is not much.
And the machine can fail. A subscription cannot fail in a way that is your problem. If the machine dies in month fourteen, somebody has to fix it, and that somebody is either your administrator or a person you pay.
The answer
Under about fourteen regular users, at business tier pricing, buy the subscriptions. Between fourteen and about twenty seven it is close enough that the deciding factor will be something other than money, usually whether you want an administrator or a monthly bill. Above about thirty regular users, owning is cheaper and it stops being close.
And if the reason you are asking is that your documents cannot go to a third party, then the crossover is two users and you already knew what you were going to do.