Self-hosting training (or gaming) makes a lot of sense, and once you have the hardware self-hosting inference on it is an easy step.

But if you have to factor in hardware costs self-hosting doesn't seem attractive. All the models I can self-host I can browse on openrouter and instantly get a provider who can get great prices. With most of the cost being in the GPUs themselves it just makes more sense to have others do it with better batching and GPU utilization