# Own your compute to keep a high-volume API profitable

- Category: business
- Author: Mihai (https://indie.md/people/mihai-balint/)
- Source: https://indie.md/journeys/mihai-ocrskill/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/own-your-compute-for-margin/

OCRskill runs on owned bare-metal hardware instead of rented per-call GPUs, and that is the reason the margins hold at volume. Per-call cloud inference is convenient at the start and brutal at scale: your cost grows in lockstep with every request, forever. For a product whose whole job is to be cheap per call and run constantly, owning the compute converts an unbounded variable cost into a fixed one. If your product's economics depend on doing one expensive operation millions of times, model the bare-metal version before you assume the cloud is cheaper.