Lesson 2: Running the model yourself, and what it costs
22 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 13 · Lesson 2 · About 45 minutes · Needs: Module 1 Lesson 2 (memory for weights and the KV cache), Module 3 Lesson 1 (prefill, decode, the KV cache), Lesson 1 of this module
The situation
It is Tuesday 25 August 2026, week 13. Yesterday's routing rule sends T-1017, Jonas Feldmann's German duplicate-charge ticket, only to a model Quillpath runs itself, because his contract promises EU processing (simulated, Lesson 1). The notebook model was too small: it called the ticket low priority.
Tomasz, who owns the platform, asks the practical questions. Which GPU? Which server? Can the weights shrink, and what breaks? How many tickets at once? What does it cost next to the API? This lesson answers each with numbers, on T-1017.