The Buyer's Toolkit
Cost · Rent vs. Own

Five-Year AI TCO Calculator

The criterion: Run the comparison over the asset's whole life, not a single month — and put back the lines the vendor leaves off the demo price.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type here is sent anywhere — that's the whole point of the AI it's built for.

Your office

Cloud cost — what you'd pay to rent

M365 Copilot $30 · ChatGPT Enterprise ~$60.
Set both token rows to 0 to model seats only.
The line vendors leave off the demo price. Enter your real uplift.
The other omitted line — data-residency / dedicated capacity.
~12%/yr is the recent SaaS average. Set 0 for a flat bill.

Owned box — what you'd pay to buy

Private AI Office: appliance + license + setup, owned outright.
Hardware only — the license and setup are already done.
Optional refinements — leave at defaults for the simple cash view
0 = fully local. A figure here loads the owned side honestly.
A subscription's residual value is always $0. The box isn't.
0 = simple cash view. Try 8% to see present value.
5-Year Cloud Total renting —
5-Year Owned Total buying —
You keep by owning —
— months until cloud spend overtakes the box
— cloud cost per seat, year 1
Year 1Year 2Year 3Year 4Year 55-Year Total
Cloud — annual——————
Cloud — cumulative—————
Owned — annual——————
Owned — cumulative—————

The owned line doesn't track headcount: one box covers up to your capacity figure, then steps up a box at a time — nothing like a per-seat bill that climbs with every hire. Most offices see owning win by year 3 — years 4 and 5 are where the gap stops being arguable.

Take it with you

.xlsx Spreadsheet The full live model — two tabs, every figure a formula you can change. .pdf One-page brief The argument in a page: what the calculator does and the lines vendors leave off.

Owning beats renting on this sheet — and the box also keeps every prompt and client file on your own machine. That's the part no calculator can price.

Scope a Private AI Office