Show HN: Beforeyouship – Pre-Build Tool to Estimate LLM Cost

Cost estimation remains one of the biggest unknowns when planning local LLM deployments, especially for teams transitioning from cloud APIs to self-hosted infrastructure. Beforeyouship addresses this gap by providing a pre-build cost modeler that lets you estimate computational requirements and expenses before deploying.

For local LLM practitioners, this tool is invaluable for capacity planning. You can model different scenarios—varying model sizes, quantization levels, batch sizes, and hardware configurations—to understand the true cost of ownership before investing in GPUs, edge devices, or multi-node clusters. This transparency helps teams make informed decisions about which models are feasible for their infrastructure constraints.

The ability to forecast costs accurately is particularly important for organizations prioritizing local deployment for privacy or latency reasons, as it removes one major barrier to adoption and helps justify infrastructure investments.

Source: Hacker News · Relevance: 8/10