$3,000/month is nuts! For $36k (1 yr of spend) you can buy a system with dual rtx pro 5000 (144GB VRAM). or spend a little more ($44k) and get two M5 Ultras w/512GB RAM. the latter, clustered, is big enough to run the biggest open weights (quantized), or smaller MoE weights on each in parallel. what you get for these systems is way more than $3k/mo of tokens, because you can run it 24/7/365. you can have pass after pass after pass of optimization, bug fixing, orchestrated subagents on backlogs, etc. way more value than paying for managed inference