Create Your Own Work Stack: Deploying Self-hosted AI and Tooling in a Tech Startup

Saad Ahmed Bazaz, Talha Amjad, Abdurrehman Subhani, Sohaib Ahmed Bazaz, Abdullah Aamir

Self-hosting AI is often presented as a way to reduce inference costs and increase control, but deployment introduces its own costs. We report our experience deploying a hybrid AI stack at Grayhat Developers, a small software company with an AI-intensive development workflow. Our initial motivation was to counter the growing cost of commercial AI usage: Claude/Codex incurred approximately \$325 per month, with more than 25.93 billion recorded tokens. We experimented with local open-source models as replacements for commercial coding agents, but after learning that their performance and inference speed were insufficient, we adopted a hybrid approach in which commercial agents remained responsible for complex tasks while local models handled lower-complexity tasks, organizational information retrieval, and synchronization with self-hosted tools including Outline, Plane, and ERPNext. We estimated that approximately 30--40\% of our commercial AI workload was associated with context transfer, documentation synchronization, task management, and related operational coordination. By moving this work to local models, we estimate that approximately 90\% of this coordination workload could…