Put in the price of the box, its power use, your local electricity price and the cloud AI spend it would replace. See how many months until the client is ahead, and what the install pays you in year one. The defaults are a hypothetical 20-person office replacing $500 a month of AI seats with a $2,699 Mac mini.
The client pays the box and your setup fee up front. Each month after that, the box saves the cloud bill it replaces, minus its electricity and your retainer. Payback is the upfront cost divided by that monthly saving. If power and the retainer cost more than the cloud bill, the box never pays back on cost alone, and the calculator says so.
Electricity is watts times hours a day times 30.4 days, divided by 1,000 for kWh, times your price. The three-year figure is 36 months of saving minus the upfront cost. It ignores tax, a replacement box and any change in cloud prices, so treat it as a rough guide.
When the cloud bill is large compared with your retainer. At the defaults, $500 a month of seats against a $250 retainer leaves about $247 a month, and the box takes about 22 months to pay back. Double the seats and payback falls to under a year. A light API bill of $50 a month will never pay back a box with a retainer, and that is fine to say to a client.
Cost is often the weaker reason. Clients who must keep documents or video in the building, or who need AI to work offline, buy for control. Cloud prices also tend to fall: Anthropic lists its newest small model, Haiku 5.5, at $0.10 per million input tokens for shorter prompts, a tenth of Haiku 4.5's price.
The box is a Mac mini with an M5 Pro and 64GB of memory, listed at $2,699 in AppleInsider's price guide in October 2026. Apple rates that model at 6 watts idle and 145 watts at most; 30 watts is our assumed average for a box answering questions through the day and idle at night. Electricity is the EIA's US commercial average of 14.47 cents per kWh for August 2026, rounded.
The $500 cloud bill is 20 Claude Team seats at $25 each, billed monthly. The setup fee, retainer and 15% hardware markup are example figures. For comparison, Upwork lists AI readiness audits at $1,500 to $4,000, and in an NSCA survey 84% of AV and IT integrators reported hardware margins of 30% or less.
Sometimes. It depends on how much cloud spend the box replaces against its price, power and upkeep. A 20-person office paying $500 a month for seats could pay back a $2,699 box and a $2,500 setup in about 22 months with a $250 retainer. A small API bill will usually never pay back a box.
Less than most people expect. Apple rates the M6 Mac mini at 4 watts idle and 70 watts at most, and NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano Super runs at 7 to 25 watts. A box averaging 30 watts around the clock uses about 22 kWh a month, about $3.20 at the August 2026 US commercial average of 14.47 cents per kWh.
Price a paid pilot, a setup fee, the hardware at cost plus a modest margin, and a monthly retainer. Upwork lists AI readiness audits at $1,500 to $4,000 and says AI consultants generally charge $35 to $60 an hour. Our pricing guide walks through each line.
Not always. Open models running on a small box handle document search, drafting and summaries well, but the largest cloud models are stronger at hard reasoning. Test the client's real tasks during a pilot, and use the half-bill line in the calculator if staff will keep some cloud seats.