The real cost to run granite 4.1 8b

ibm-granite · 8.8B parameters · 131.1K context · commercial OK

granite 4.1 8b — 8.8B params (ibm-granite). Auto-indexed from the Hugging Face Hub (646,875 downloads). Parameter count is exact; download size and quantizations are estimates.

What it costs to run granite 4.1 8b — $0 markup

• On your own machine — $0. Runs free locally if you have about 9 GB of VRAM at Q4_K_M (point Spanvero at LM Studio, Ollama, or llama.cpp).
• On your own rented GPU — from $0.26/hr. NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB at the direct Vast.ai price (≈ $0.10 a session), $0 markup.
• Via your own API key — $0.08/1M tokens (blended input + output). No GPU to manage (real price, 2026-07-06).

When does owning hardware beat the API?

At $0.075/1M tokens, the cheapest API for granite 4.1 8b stays cheaper than a used RTX 3090 at any daily volume — electricity alone costs more per token than the API does.

Local is never $0 — every figure here includes electricity and hardware amortization. Speeds come from published 7-8B Q4 benchmarks (your model, quant, and context will differ); break-even volumes are rounded to 2 significant figures.

Key facts

Open the free Spanvero advisor → for the live, interactive math for your exact workload and hardware.

Related models

• PowerMoE 3b — 3.4B, ibm-research
• granite 4.0 h small — 32.2B, ibm-granite
• granite 4.1 3b — 3.4B, ibm-granite
• Llama 3.1 8B Instruct — 8B, Meta
• Qwen2.5 7B Instruct — 7B, Alibaba

Browse: More IBM Granite models · All models · Compare

Spanvero · What's new · Prices as of 2026-07-06. We're an honest advisor — $0 markup, your own accounts, we never resell compute. © 2026 Cynosure LLC.