When do your own GPUs beat Amazon Bedrock for the same open-weight model? Official AWS prices, the tokens per second you need to break even, and the Karpenter and vLLM config to test it.

By Evgeny Anikiev, AWS-certified DevOps engineer with 10+ years running build automation, CI/CD, and Kubernetes in production. Prices pulled from the AWS Price List API on October 23, 2026 (US East, N. Virginia, on-demand list prices).

TL;DR: The same open-weight model costs per token on Bedrock and per hour on your own GPUs. One H100 on a p5.4xlarge running gpt-oss-120b costs $5,022 a month. To beat Bedrock's price for that model, it has to process about 7,300 tokens per second, around the clock, every day of the month. Unless your traffic is that high and that steady, Bedrock costs less.…