> But it’s generally both inexpensive and fast.

I guess inexpensive is relative. I've been on cloud for a while so I'm not sure what the going rates are for "remote hands" and most of my experience is with on-premise vs co-lo.

> Two of everything may still be cheaper than expensive cloud services.

That is true. Everything has tradeoffs. Though in the OPs case I think the math is relatively clear. With Open AIs pricing he calculated the break even at 5 years just for the hardware and electricity. Assuming that calculation is right, two of everything would up that to 7+ years, at which point... a lot can happen in 7 years.