Over the last year, three major managed platforms for AI agents removed unlimited tiers and increased inference pricing by 30–60%. Self-hosted on your own VDS is looking attractive again — if you do the math correctly.
The economics
A VDS with 2 vCPU / 2 GB / 30 GB SSD costs around 300 RUB/mo and handles a steady workload of openclaw with a 50,000-vector LightRAG knowledge base. The same workload on managed cloud runs about 2 990 RUB/mo. That nine-fold gap is not an exaggeration.
When self-hosted does NOT fit
If your traffic is spiky (×10 in seconds) with unpredictable bursts — managed is still the right call. Self-hosted shines on steady workloads and when you control the schedule.
Detailed numbers and scenario comparisons are in our pricing grid.