Enter your cloud bill, a hardware quote, and a colo quote — walk away with the break-even month, 36-month totals, and a 47-point audit that becomes a 90-day plan.
Compare the same workload and quality target over the same time horizon. Count upfront costs and recurring operating costs for each option. A lower hardware quote alone does not establish a saving.
Assume cloud/API costs $10,000 per month, owned hardware costs $60,000 upfront plus $4,000 per month to operate, and setup costs are $0. With flat usage, no refresh and no residual value, the monthly difference is $6,000. Break-even is $60,000 ÷ $6,000 = 10 months. At 36 months, cloud costs $360,000; owned costs $60,000 + (36 × $4,000) = $204,000. The modeled difference is $156,000 before omitted costs.
The workbook has Read me, Calculator and Monthly Detail tabs. Its Calculator inputs include upfront hardware, setup, base monthly run cost, monthly growth, annual maintenance and refresh cycle for cloud/API, owned + colo, and managed hosting. The example above is a simplified text preview, not the full workbook.
Include staffing, power, rack space, maintenance, migration and utilization in your estimates. Check that the chosen hardware can deliver your workload and quality requirements. Tax, financing, downtime and resale assumptions can change the result; this simplified example excludes them. If monthly owned cost is at least cloud cost, there is no positive break-even under these assumptions.
Compare the free calculator and the toolkit · Need an advisory engagement? Visit Intelix Systems
Enter your monthly cloud/API spend, a hardware quote, and a colo quote. The model computes the break-even month, 36-month cumulative totals for cloud vs. owned vs. managed, and a plain-language verdict — recalculated live as you change assumptions.
Six phases from inventory to decision: workload census, spend attribution, security screen (including an OWASP LLM Top-10 pass), vendor-exposure review, and the checklist that turns findings into a 90-day plan.
Engineering leaders, platform teams, and finance partners staring at an AI bill that grew into a second cloud bill — and being asked "should we buy GPUs?" without a defensible model to answer with.
Any spreadsheet app that opens .xlsx with formulas — Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice are both verified. The audit is a standard .docx.
No. One purchase, instant download, yours to keep and reuse across scenarios.
Yours. Nothing is pre-baked — every output traces to an input cell you control, so the result survives scrutiny from finance.
Use the AI TCO calculator vs toolkit vs consultant comparison to choose the cheapest evidence level that can support your decision.