A customer wants to self-host open weights instead of paying API fees. How do you model the real costs and decide?
The GPU-utilization math that decides this argument, the hidden line items (ops headcount, quality gap, model churn), and the hybrid recommendation that wins both the analysis and the customer.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The GPU-utilization math that decides this argument, the hidden line items (ops headcount, quality gap, model churn), and the hybrid recommendation that wins both the analysis and the customer.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
