Own Your Tech

I run my own AI. I open-source everything I learn. This is where I write about the hardware, the models, the agents, and why it all matters.

A living section — updated as I build, break, and ship new infrastructure.

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How We Picked Our Open-Source AI Model (And Why We Didn't Pick the "Best" One)

How We Picked Our Open-Source AI Model (And Why We Didn't Pick the "Best" One)

TL;DR: * There are dozens of open-source AI models and new ones drop weekly. * Most comparison guides are benchmark tables that mean nothing to business leaders. * Here's how we actually chose — why we went with a smaller, "less impressive" model over the flashy options, and why that turned out to be the right call. In my last post, I wrote about self-hosting our own AI for $700 a month. A lot of people asked the same follow-up: how did you pick the model? Honestly, this was the hardest pa

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I Self-Hosted My Own AI for $700 a Month. Here's What I Actually Learned

I Self-Hosted My Own AI for $700 a Month. Here's What I Actually Learned

TL;DR: * Full self-hosting of top-tier AI costs $20,000–$50,000/month and isn't worth it for most businesses. * Cloud-hosted models (AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure) are the underrated middle ground — you get the best AI with your data staying in your account. * I built a private AI setup for $700/month and it covers 80% of daily tasks. Here's the full breakdown, the real costs, and a decision framework for what makes sense for your business. My team and I just spent a few days building o

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Why Own Your AI

Every prompt you send to a cloud API is a dependency you don't control. Ownership changes everything.

Renting

  • •Your data trains someone else's model
  • •Pricing changes overnight, your margins vanish
  • •API goes down, your product goes down
  • •No control over what gets censored or filtered

Owning

  • •Your data never leaves your machine
  • •Fixed cost hardware, infinite inference
  • •Runs offline, runs forever, no vendor lock-in
  • •Full control over every parameter and output

“If you can't run it yourself, you don't own it. You're just renting intelligence from someone who can shut it off.”

The models are open. The hardware is affordable. The only thing missing is the knowledge — that's what these essays are for.

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Hardware builds, self-hosting guides, agent frameworks, and the case for owning your stack. No hype. Just what works.

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