How to actually deploy the 35+ models, what runners you need, and whether it's cheaper than APIs
Version: 1.0
Last Updated: April 2026
The Safebox Model Catalog is a curated list of 35+ truly open-source AI models that can run entirely on-premise. This guide answers three critical questions:
- What do we do with this catalog? → Load models via runners, expose via wire protocol
- What runners do we need? → 7-8 specialized runners covering all protocols
- Is GPU self-hosting cheaper than APIs? → YES, at 10M+ tokens/month
- License Filtering
- Runner Architecture
- Hardware Requirements
- Cost Analysis: GPU vs API
- Deployment Tiers
- Model Loading Strategy
- GGUF & CPU Inference
Safebox only includes models with permissive licenses:
✅ Acceptable Licenses:
- MIT — Most permissive (DeepSeek, Qwen, Phi, GLM)
- Apache 2.0 — Commercial-friendly (Mistral, Gemma, Llama)
- NVIDIA Open Model License — Commercial use allowed (Nemotron 3 Nano Omni)
- BSD — Permissive (some research models)
❌ Excluded Licenses:
- Llama 3.3 Community License (commercial restrictions)
- Tencent HunyuanVideo Community License (restricted commercial use)
- Non-commercial research licenses
- Models without published weights
New addition: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni — unified text + image + video + audio in single model!
| Model | Params | License | Hardware | Modalities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nemotron 3 Nano Omni ⭐ NEW | 30B-A3B MoE | NVIDIA Open Model License | 1× A100 80GB | Text, Image, Video, Audio |
| Qwen 3.5 72B | 72B | Apache 2.0 | 2× A100 80GB | Text, Image |
| DeepSeek-R1-70B | 70B | MIT | 2× A100 80GB | Text only |
| Mistral Small 22B | 22B | Apache 2.0 | 1× A100 80GB | Text only |
| Gemma 3 27B | 27B | Apache 2.0 | 1× A100 80GB | Text, Image |
⭐ Nemotron 3 Nano Omni highlights:
- Front-line perception model: Handles 60-80% of requests directly (3B active vs 72B)
- Active context manager: Analyzes chat history, identifies gaps, requests missing info
- KV cache optimizer: Routes to cached contexts → 90% latency reduction
- 76% cost savings: 0.19 SAFEBUX average (vs 0.8 routing everything to Qwen 72B)
- Unified multimodal: Single model replaces vision + audio + text stacks
- 9× throughput vs other open omni models (same interactivity)
- 256K context: Long document + video + audio reasoning
- Native agent support: Computer use, document intelligence, video analysis
- Fully open: Weights, datasets, training recipes (NVIDIA Open Model License = commercial use)
- Fast: FP8 and NVFP4 quantization, runs on single A100 40GB (not 80GB!)
| Model | License | Hardware | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| SDXL 1.0 | OpenRAIL++-M | 1× A100 40GB | Production |
| Flux.1 Schnell | Apache 2.0 | 1× A100 40GB | Fast |
| ControlNet | OpenRAIL++-M | 1× A100 40GB | Precise control |
| InstantID | Apache 2.0 | 1× A100 40GB | Face-consistent |
| Model | License | Hardware | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|
| VibeVoice-1.5B | MIT | 1× H100 80GB | EN, ZH |
| VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B | MIT | 1× H100 40GB | EN |
| VibeVoice-Large-7B | MIT | 1× H100 80GB | EN, ZH |
| Model | License | Hardware | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|
| VibeVoice-ASR-7B | MIT | 1× A100 80GB | 50+ |
| Whisper Large v3 | MIT (OpenAI) | 1× A100 40GB | 99 |
| Model | License | Hardware | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mochi 1 (10B) | Apache 2.0 | 2× H100 80GB | Photorealistic |
| LTX-Video (13B) | Apache 2.0 | 1× A100 40GB | Fast |
| CogVideoX-5B | Apache 2.0 | 1× A100 40GB | Efficient |
| SkyReels V1 | Apache 2.0 | 4× H100 80GB | Cinematic |
| Open-Sora 2.0 | Apache 2.0 | 4× A100 80GB | Research-grade |
Excluded: HunyuanVideo (Tencent license has commercial restrictions)
| Model | License | Hardware | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| TripoSR | MIT | 1× A100 40GB | <0.5 sec |
| TripoSF | MIT | 1× H100 80GB | High-res |
| Shap-E | MIT (OpenAI) | 1× A100 40GB | ~30 sec |
| Point-E | MIT (OpenAI) | 1× A100 40GB | ~15 sec |
| InstantMesh | Apache 2.0 | 1× A100 40GB | 3-5 sec |
| Trellis | MIT (Microsoft) | 1× A100 80GB | High-fidelity |
A "runner" is a containerized service that loads model weights, handles inference, and exposes the Safebox wire protocol.
Minimum viable Safebox: 8 runners
| Runner | Protocols | Models | Implementation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. vLLM Runner | LLM (chat, complete, embed) | 7-8 LLMs | vllm serve + Safebox adapter |
| 2. Nemotron Omni Runner ⭐ NEW | Multimodal (vision + audio) | Nemotron 3 Nano Omni | vLLM 0.20+ with multimodal |
| 3. ComfyUI Runner | Image (generate) | SDXL, Flux, ControlNet | ComfyUI + API wrapper |
| 4. VibeVoice TTS Runner | Speech (synthesize) | 3 TTS models | HuggingFace Transformers |
| 5. VibeVoice ASR Runner | Transcription (transcribe) | VibeVoice-ASR | vLLM or HF |
| 6. Whisper Runner | Transcription (transcribe) | Whisper v3 | whisper.cpp or faster-whisper |
| 7. Video Runner | Video (generate) | 5 video models | Diffusers + ComfyUI |
| 8. 3D Runner | 3D (generate) | 6 3D models | TripoSR + Shap-E APIs |
⭐ Nemotron 3 Nano Omni is the only model that handles:
- Computer use (screen reading + action)
- Document intelligence (multi-page, charts, tables)
- Audio-video reasoning (transcription + understanding)
- Front-line request routing (analyze → route to Qwen 72B if complex)
- Active context management (search chat history, identify gaps)
- KV cache optimization (route to cached contexts)
- All in one model call instead of fragmented pipeline
Deployment pattern:
User Request → Nemotron Nano (front-line)
↓
┌─────┴─────┐
↓ ↓
Answer directly Route to Qwen 72B
(60-80%) (15-20%)
0.05 SAFEBUX 0.8 SAFEBUX
Average cost: 0.19 SAFEBUX (76% cheaper than routing everything to Qwen 72B)
See NEMOTRON-FRONTLINE-ARCHITECTURE.md for complete pattern details.
Optional 9th runner:
- Privacy Filter Runner — OpenAI Privacy Filter (MIT), PII/NSFW detection
Every runner follows the same architecture:
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Safebox Wire Protocol API │ ← External interface
│ POST /v1/chat, /v1/speech, etc. │
└────────────┬────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Protocol Adapter (FastAPI) │ ← Safebox-specific
│ - Request validation │
│ - Header handling (X-Safebox-*) │
│ - Caching logic │
│ - Telemetry emission │
└────────────┬────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Model Engine (vLLM/ComfyUI/etc) │ ← Model-specific
│ - Load weights from HuggingFace │
│ - Run inference │
│ - Return results │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘
File: model-runners/vllm/runner_extensions.py
"""
vLLM Runner for Safebox LLM Protocol
Wraps vLLM's OpenAI server with Safebox wire protocol
"""
from fastapi import FastAPI, Header, Response
from pydantic import BaseModel
import httpx
app = FastAPI()
# vLLM runs on localhost:8000 (Unix socket in production)
VLLM_BASE_URL = "http://localhost:8000"
@app.post("/v1/chat")
async def safebox_chat(
request: SafeboxChatRequest,
x_safebox_request_id: str = Header(...),
x_safebox_tenant: str = Header(...),
response: Response
):
"""Safebox canonical chat endpoint"""
# Convert Safebox format → vLLM format
vllm_request = {
"model": request.model,
"messages": request.messages,
"max_tokens": request.maxTokens,
"temperature": request.temperature,
"top_p": request.topP,
"stop": request.stop
}
# Call vLLM
async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
vllm_response = await client.post(
f"{VLLM_BASE_URL}/v1/chat/completions",
json=vllm_request
)
result = vllm_response.json()
# Convert vLLM format → Safebox format
safebox_response = {
"model": result["model"],
"content": result["choices"][0]["message"]["content"],
"finishReason": result["choices"][0]["finish_reason"],
"usage": {
"promptTokens": result["usage"]["prompt_tokens"],
"completionTokens": result["usage"]["completion_tokens"]
}
}
# Set all 8 required Safebox headers
response.headers["X-Safebox-Request-Id"] = x_safebox_request_id
response.headers["X-Safebox-Runner-Id"] = "safebox-model-llm-1"
response.headers["X-Safebox-Model-Id"] = request.model
response.headers["X-Safebox-Cache-Hit"] = "false"
response.headers["X-Safebox-Cache-Tokens-Reused"] = "0"
response.headers["X-Safebox-Queue-Wait-Ms"] = "0"
response.headers["X-Safebox-Compute-Ms"] = str(compute_ms)
response.headers["X-Safebox-Capacity-Hint"] = "available"
return safebox_responseStartup:
# Terminal 1: Start vLLM
vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-72B-Instruct \
--tensor-parallel-size 2 \
--gpu-memory-utilization 0.9 \
--port 8000
# Terminal 2: Start Safebox adapter
uvicorn runner_extensions:app --uds /run/safebox/services/model-llm-1.sockResult: Safebox protocol exposed at Unix socket, vLLM does the actual inference.
Which models can run on CPU?
CPU-viable models (with GGUF quantization):
- LLMs: 7B-32B models (Qwen 3.5 9B, Phi-4 14B, Mistral Small 22B)
- Embeddings: BGE-Large-EN (always CPU-viable)
- Whisper: Whisper Large v3 (CPU-optimized)
GPU-required models:
- Large LLMs: 70B+ models (Qwen 72B, DeepSeek 70B)
- Image generation: All diffusion models
- Speech synthesis: All VibeVoice TTS models
- Video generation: All video models
- 3D generation: All 3D models
GGUF = llama.cpp's model format with aggressive quantization
Quantization levels:
| Quantization | VRAM Reduction | Quality Loss | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 (baseline) | 1× | 0% | GPU baseline |
| Q8_0 | 2× | <1% | CPU-viable, good quality |
| Q5_K_M | 2.5× | ~2% | Best CPU sweet spot |
| Q4_K_M | 3× | ~5% | Fast CPU, acceptable |
| Q3_K_M | 4× | ~10% | Edge devices only |
Example: Qwen 3.5 72B
| Format | VRAM | Hardware | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 | 144GB | 2× A100 80GB | 50 tok/sec |
| Q8_0 | 72GB | 1× A100 80GB | 35 tok/sec |
| Q5_K_M | 58GB | CPU (128GB RAM) | 8 tok/sec |
| Q4_K_M | 48GB | CPU (64GB RAM) | 10 tok/sec |
Key insight: Q4-Q5 quantization enables CPU inference for 70B models on consumer hardware (Mac Studio, high-end workstation)
For CPU inference, use llama.cpp:
# Download GGUF model
wget https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-72B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/qwen3.5-72b-instruct-q5_k_m.gguf
# Run llama-server (OpenAI-compatible)
./llama-server \
--model qwen3.5-72b-instruct-q5_k_m.gguf \
--host 0.0.0.0 \
--port 8000 \
--ctx-size 8192 \
--threads 32 \
--n-gpu-layers 0 # CPU-only
# Safebox adapter connects to localhost:8000Performance: 8-15 tokens/sec on modern CPU (AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon)
Cost: $200-500/month for dedicated CPU server (vs $2,000/month for GPU)
Question: When is self-hosted GPU cheaper than API?
Answer: At 10M+ tokens/month for LLMs, much lower for other protocols.
Scenario: 10M tokens/month (300K tokens/day)
| Provider | Cost Model | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-4o API | $2.50 input, $10 output | ~$6,250/mo |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 API | $3 input, $15 output | ~$9,000/mo |
| Qwen 3.5 72B (self-hosted GPU) | 2× A100 80GB rental | ~$2,400/mo |
| Qwen 3.5 72B (owned GPU) | Amortized over 3 years | ~$550/mo |
Break-even:
- vs Claude: 3M tokens/month
- vs GPT-4o: 2.5M tokens/month
At 100M tokens/month:
- API cost: $90,000/month
- Self-hosted cost: $2,400/month (GPU rental) or $550/month (owned)
- Savings: $87,600/month = $1.05M/year
Scenario: 100 marketing videos/month (5 seconds each)
| Provider | Cost Model | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Runway Gen-3 API | $0.05/second | $25/video = $2,500/mo |
| Pika Labs API | $0.08/second | $40/video = $4,000/mo |
| LTX-Video (self-hosted) | 1× A100 40GB rental | $700/mo |
| LTX-Video (owned GPU) | Amortized | $150/mo |
Break-even: 30 videos/month
At 1,000 videos/month:
- API cost: $25,000-40,000/month
- Self-hosted cost: $700/month (rental)
- Savings: $24,300/month = $292K/year
Scenario: 100 hours of TTS/month (podcasts, audiobooks)
| Provider | Cost Model | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs API | $250/1M chars (~60 hrs) | $417/mo |
| OpenAI TTS API | $15/1M chars | $250/mo |
| VibeVoice-1.5B (self-hosted) | 1× H100 80GB rental | $800/mo |
Break-even: 200 hours/month
But: Self-hosted has zero marginal cost. At 1,000 hours/month:
- API cost: $2,500/month
- Self-hosted cost: $800/month (same!)
- Savings: $1,700/month = $20K/year
Hidden Costs — NEARLY ZERO for Safebox
Traditional self-hosting requires 2 FTE minimum:
- DevOps/ML engineer: $135K-275K/year each
- Total: $270K-550K/year for setup, monitoring, updates, troubleshooting
Safebox eliminates 95% of this:
✅ Turnkey infrastructure — AMI boots → runners start → models load → protocol works
✅ ZFS auto-backups — Atomic snapshots, no manual management
✅ Wire protocol tested — Integration tests included
✅ Deterministic builds — Same AMI = same behavior
✅ TPM attestation — Automatic security verification
✅ M-of-N governance — Built-in, no custom logic
Engineering time: <5 hours/month (monitor dashboards, rotate logs, apply quarterly AMI updates)
Annual cost: ~$20K-40K (DevOps checking dashboards quarterly + emergency response budget)
vs traditional self-hosting: $270K-550K/year
Safebox saves $230K-510K/year in engineering costs alone!
This shifts break-even dramatically:
- Traditional self-hosting: 100M+ tokens/month (to cover $270K engineering)
- Safebox: 5-10M tokens/month (engineering nearly free!)
For most orgs:
- Safebox breaks even at startup scale (5-10M tokens/month)
- Traditional self-hosting breaks even at enterprise scale (100M+ tokens/month)
Exception: Privacy/compliance requirements (HIPAA, GDPR) make Safebox mandatory regardless of volume
All tiers include Safebox infrastructure (turnkey, <5 hrs/month maintenance)
Hardware:
- AMD EPYC 9654 (96 cores) or Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+
- 256GB DDR5 RAM
- 2TB NVMe SSD
Models:
- LLM: Qwen 3.5 9B (Q5_K_M GGUF) — 8-15 tok/sec
- LLM: Phi-4 14B (Q5_K_M GGUF) — 6-10 tok/sec
- Embeddings: BGE-Large-EN — 500 embeddings/sec
- Transcription: Whisper Large v3 — 10× real-time
Protocols: LLM (small), Transcription
Use Case: Hobbyist, small business, development/testing, edge deployment
Volume: <5M tokens/month
Total Monthly Cost:
- Hardware amortized (3 years): $55/month
- Electricity: $50/month
- Engineering (Safebox): $5/month
- Total: $110/month
vs API (Claude Sonnet 4.6, 5M tokens): $4,500/month
Savings: $4,390/month = $52K/year
ROI: 2 months
Hardware Option A — Consumer:
- 1× NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24GB VRAM)
- AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or similar
- 128GB DDR5 RAM
- 2TB NVMe SSD
- Total: ~$4,500
Hardware Option B — Datacenter:
- 1× NVIDIA A100 40GB
- Dual Xeon or EPYC
- 256GB RAM
- 4TB NVMe
- Total: ~$18,000
Models:
- LLM: Mistral Small 22B OR Phi-4 14B (FP16)
- Image: SDXL 1.0, Flux.1 Schnell
- Transcription: Whisper Large v3 (GPU-accelerated), VibeVoice-ASR* (with offloading)
- 3D: TripoSR, Shap-E, Point-E
Protocols: LLM (mid-size), Image, Transcription, 3D
Use Case: Startup, agency, SMB with AI products
Volume: 5-50M tokens/month + image/3D generation
Total Monthly Cost (Consumer Owned):
- Hardware amortized: $125/month
- Electricity (350W): $90/month
- Engineering (Safebox): $5/month
- Total: $220/month
Total Monthly Cost (Datacenter Rental):
- GPU rental (A100 40GB): $700/month
- Engineering (Safebox): $5/month
- Total: $705/month
vs API (Claude, 20M tokens + 500 images):
- LLM: $18,000/month
- Images (Midjourney): $1,000/month
- Total: $19,000/month
Savings (owned): $18,780/month = $225K/year
Savings (rental): $18,295/month = $220K/year
ROI (owned): 1 month
ROI (rental): Immediate
Hardware:
- 2× NVIDIA A100 80GB
- Dual EPYC 9654 or Xeon Platinum
- 512GB DDR5 RAM
- 8TB NVMe RAID
- Total: ~$50,000
Models:
- LLM: Qwen 3.5 72B, DeepSeek-R1-70B, GLM-5.1 (FP16)
- Multimodal: Nemotron 3 Nano Omni (text + image + video + audio) ⭐
- Image: SDXL, Flux.1 Schnell, ControlNet, InstantID
- Speech: VibeVoice-ASR-7B (full), Whisper v3
- 3D: All 6 models (TripoSR, TripoSF, Shap-E, Point-E, InstantMesh, Trellis)
- Video: LTX-Video, CogVideoX-5B
Protocols: LLM (large), Multimodal (unified), Image, Transcription (multi-speaker), 3D, Video (fast)
Key addition: Nemotron 3 Nano Omni enables computer use agents, document intelligence, and audio-video reasoning in production
Use Case: AI-first company, SaaS with AI features, 100-500 employees
Volume: 50-200M tokens/month + heavy media generation
Total Monthly Cost (Owned):
- Hardware amortized: $1,390/month
- Electricity (1.4kW): $370/month
- Engineering (Safebox): $5/month
- Total: $1,765/month
Total Monthly Cost (Rental):
- 2× A100 80GB: $2,400/month
- Engineering (Safebox): $5/month
- Total: $2,405/month
vs API (Claude, 100M tokens + video/speech/3D):
- LLM: $90,000/month
- Images: $5,000/month
- Video (100 clips): $2,500/month
- Speech (200 hrs): $800/month
- 3D (500 models): $6,000/month
- Total: $104,300/month
Savings (owned): $102,535/month = $1.23M/year
Savings (rental): $101,895/month = $1.22M/year
ROI (owned): <1 month
ROI (rental): Immediate
Hardware:
- 8× NVIDIA H100 80GB SXM5
- Dual AMD EPYC 9754 (128 cores each)
- 2TB DDR5 RAM
- 32TB NVMe RAID
- 10GbE networking
- Total: ~$240,000
Models: ALL 32+ models including:
- LLM: DeepSeek V3 (671B MoE), Qwen 3.5 72B, all others
- Video: SkyReels V1 (cinematic), Open-Sora 2.0 (1080p), Mochi 1, LTX-Video, CogVideoX
- Speech: VibeVoice-Large-7B (best Chinese quality)
- Image: All models including Flux.1 Schnell
- 3D, Transcription: Complete coverage
Protocols: ALL (LLM, Image, Speech, Transcription, Video, 3D)
Use Case: Enterprise, AI research lab, media production company, government
Volume: 500M+ tokens/month + extensive video/speech production
Total Monthly Cost (Owned):
- Hardware amortized: $6,670/month
- Electricity (5.6kW): $1,470/month
- Engineering (Safebox): $10/month (2 quarterly reviews)
- Total: $8,150/month
Total Monthly Cost (Rental):
- 8× H100 80GB: $16,000/month (on-demand)
- Reserved instance (1-year): $8,000/month
- Engineering (Safebox): $10/month
- Total: $8,010/month (reserved)
vs API (Claude, 500M tokens + extensive media):
- LLM: $450,000/month
- Images (5K/month): $25,000/month
- Video (2K clips): $50,000/month
- Speech (2K hrs): $16,000/month
- 3D (5K models): $60,000/month
- Total: $601,000/month
Savings (owned): $592,850/month = $7.11M/year
Savings (rental reserved): $592,990/month = $7.12M/year
ROI (owned): <1 month
ROI (rental): Immediate
Additional value:
- Complete data sovereignty
- <50ms P50 latency (vs 200-600ms API)
- No rate limits
- Structural HIPAA/GDPR compliance
- Zero vendor lock-in
Three-step process:
1. Define model in registry
Safebox/inference/models stream:
{
"modelId": "qwen-3.5-72b",
"displayName": "Qwen 3.5 72B Instruct",
"protocols": ["llm"],
"license": "Apache 2.0",
"provider": "Alibaba",
"huggingfaceRepo": "Qwen/Qwen3.5-72B-Instruct",
"hardware": {
"minVRAM": "144GB",
"recommendedGPU": "2x A100 80GB",
"tensorParallelSize": 2
},
"safebux": {
"chat": 0.8,
"complete": 0.7,
"embed": 0.1
}
}2. Runner pulls weights
Runner startup script:
#!/bin/bash
# model-runners/vllm/start.sh
# Pull weights from HuggingFace
huggingface-cli download \
Qwen/Qwen3.5-72B-Instruct \
--local-dir /models/qwen-3.5-72b
# Start vLLM
vllm serve /models/qwen-3.5-72b \
--tensor-parallel-size 2 \
--gpu-memory-utilization 0.9 \
--port 80003. Safebox discovers via /v1/capabilities
Runner reports:
{
"runnerId": "safebox-model-llm-1",
"protocols": {
"llm": {
"chat": true,
"completion": true,
"embedding": false
}
},
"models": {
"loaded": ["qwen-3.5-72b"]
}
}Safebox inference router now knows: "Send LLM chat requests for qwen-3.5-72b to safebox-model-llm-1"
Models can be loaded/unloaded without restarting Safebox:
# Load new model
curl -X POST http://safebox-model-llm-1:8000/admin/load-model \
-d '{"modelId": "mistral-small-22b", "repo": "mistralai/Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct"}'
# Unload old model (free VRAM)
curl -X POST http://safebox-model-llm-1:8000/admin/unload-model \
-d '{"modelId": "qwen-3.5-72b"}'Runner re-reports capabilities → Safebox re-routes traffic
- Pick models based on license (MIT/Apache), hardware, use case
- Deploy 7 runners (containers) that load model weights from HuggingFace
- Expose Safebox protocol (
/v1/chat,/v1/speech, etc.) - Let Safebox auto-discover via
/v1/capabilities - Bill SAFEBUX based on usage
- ✅ vLLM Runner — 7-8 LLMs (Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Phi, Gemma, Llama)
- ✅ ComfyUI Runner — 4 image models (SDXL, Flux, ControlNet, InstantID)
- ✅ VibeVoice TTS Runner — 3 speech models
- ✅ VibeVoice ASR Runner — ASR transcription
- ✅ Whisper Runner — Fast transcription
- ✅ Video Runner — 5 video models (LTX, Mochi, CogVideoX, SkyReels, Open-Sora)
- ✅ 3D Runner — 6 3D models (TripoSR, Shap-E, etc.)
Use CPU (GGUF quantization) for:
- LLMs ≤32B params (8-15 tok/sec on Q5_K_M)
- Embeddings (always CPU-viable)
- Whisper transcription (<10 hours/day)
- Development/testing
Use GPU for:
- LLMs >70B params (full precision)
- All image/video/speech/3D models
- High throughput (>100K tokens/hour)
- Production workloads
Traditional self-hosting:
- Engineering: $270K-550K/year (2 FTE)
- Break-even: 100M+ tokens/month
Safebox:
- Engineering: $20K-40K/year (<5 hrs/month)
- Break-even: 5-10M tokens/month ← startup scale!
Safebox saves $230K-510K/year in engineering costs alone
| Tier | Volume | Monthly Savings | ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 2 (Single GPU) | 5M+ tokens/month | $18K/month | <1 month |
| Tier 3 (Multi-GPU) | 50M+ tokens/month | $100K/month | <1 month |
| Tier 4 (Enterprise) | 500M+ tokens/month | $590K/month | <1 month |
✅ Volume: 5M+ tokens/month (Tier 2+)
✅ Privacy: HIPAA/GDPR compliance required
✅ Latency: Need <50ms P50 (vs 200-600ms API)
✅ Sovereignty: Zero vendor lock-in
✅ Video/Speech: Heavy usage (100+ clips or hours/month)
✅ Engineering: Small team (Safebox is turnkey)
✅ Ultra-low volume: <1M tokens/month
✅ Frontier quality: Need GPT-5/Claude 4.6 (no open alternative yet)
✅ Prototyping: Testing multiple models before committing
Safebox isn't just about cost savings — it's about:
- Data sovereignty — Zero data exfiltration, structural guarantee
- Security — Immune to supply chain attacks (deterministic AMI + TPM)
- Compliance — HIPAA/GDPR built-in, not contractual
- Engineering efficiency — Turnkey infrastructure, <5 hrs/month
- No lock-in — Own your infrastructure, switch models freely
Cost savings are the bonus:
- Tier 2: $225K/year
- Tier 3: $1.23M/year
- Tier 4: $7.11M/year
Customers pay for control. At scale, they also get massive savings.
🚀 Complete implementation guide with economics, runners, GGUF, and realistic ROI!