I Replaced $800/mo in API Costs with a Local Llama 4 Setup for E-Commerce

An e-commerce team shifted bulk product-description generation from GPT-4o APIs to a locally hosted Llama 4 Maverick model via Ollama.

They picked a Hermes fine-tune for more reliable JSON and tool calls, while keeping some cloud API usage for other tasks.

Monthly LLM costs dropped from roughly $600-$800 to about $40 in electricity.

The case highlights how self-hosting can reduce spend, avoid rate limits, and keep sensitive commerce data in-house, with hardware and model-quality tradeoffs.