Free model access is not a gift. It is a contract with someone else's rate limits, queueing policy, and maintenance schedule. Self-hosting inverts that contract: you own the latency, the GPU, and the 2 a.
Source: [Dev.to](https://dev.to/codepro_3283/free-endpoints-are-a-contract-not-a-gift-a-fit-test-for-agent-workloads-2h9c)