An Honest Answer to the Only Question That Matters Before You Spend: Build, Rent, or Both?
We model your training and inference profile against current CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda and Crusoe pricing and a five-year owned-asset case — utilisation, power cost, refresh cycle, financing — then recommend. If the answer is rent, we tell you that.
Who This Is For
- CTOs and CFOs facing a seven- or eight-figure cloud commitment and asking what owning would cost
- Teams whose rented GPU bill has crossed the line where capex looks cheaper
- Boards and investors who need an independent view before approving a build
- Companies with mixed workloads that may belong partly in the cloud and partly on their floor
What's Included
Workload Profiling
Training cadence, inference volume, utilisation patterns and growth scenarios captured from your actual usage data.
Rent-Side Model
Current on-demand, reserved and committed rate cards from the major neoclouds and hyperscalers, with egress, storage and support included.
Build-Side Model
Hardware, facility, power, cooling, staffing, maintenance and financing for an owned cluster, with a realistic refresh cycle.
Sensitivity Analysis
Break-even against utilisation, power price, GPU pricing trends and financing cost so you understand what moves the answer.
Hybrid Design
Where it fits, a baseline-owned plus burst-rented architecture with the operational model to run it.
Recommendation Package
Board-ready report, financial model and, if the answer is build, a sized design basis and budgetary estimate.
Reference Specifications
Starting points. Every engagement is engineered to the workload, site and budget in front of us.
| Inputs | Cloud bills and usage exports, planned model and product roadmap, power tariff, site options, financing terms |
|---|---|
| Rent benchmarks | CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe and hyperscaler GPU pricing, refreshed at engagement start |
| Build model | Capex, opex, staffing, maintenance, 3–5 year refresh, residual value, financing (cash, lease, debt) |
| Outputs | Five-year TCO comparison, break-even curves, sensitivity tables, hybrid scenario, written recommendation |
| Format | Executive report, editable financial model, presentation to leadership or board |
How We Deliver
- 1
Data Gathering
Weeks 1Usage data, roadmap, constraints and site options collected; assumptions agreed.
- 2
Modelling
Weeks 1–2Rent and build cases built and stress-tested; hybrid options explored.
- 3
Recommendation
Weeks 2–3Findings presented, questions worked through, final report and model delivered.
Questions We Get Asked
Is this just a sales step toward a build?
No. The engagement is priced and delivered independently of any build contract, and a meaningful share of our recommendations are to keep renting or go hybrid.
Do you include the cost of our own staff to run a cluster?
Yes. Staffing or managed-operations cost is a line in the build model, because an owned cluster without an operating plan is not a fair comparison.
How current are the rate cards?
We refresh neocloud and hyperscaler pricing at the start of every engagement and show the date on every table.
Request a Quotation
Pre-tagged as Build-vs-rent advisory. A solutions engineer responds the same business day.