Three items this month: where local AI actually pays for itself, how to tell real managed detection from a dashboard subscription, and whether a screen beats printed signage. The fact first, then what to do about it.

Break-even math assumes the stack runs itself. It does not: someone owns the serving engine, the GPU scheduling, the model updates, and the access rules that decide who can ask what. That labor never shows up in the comparison, and it is usually where self-hosting projects stall. Adaptive Reservoir is a private, governed AI your organization runs, on-prem or in the cloud, with your data staying under your control. Decide first which workloads genuinely need to stay inside, then size hardware to those, not to the whole wish list.

Before you can price any of this you need to know what you own. Per-endpoint and per-user quotes assume an accurate list of devices and accounts, and the gap between that list and reality is where attackers sit, because an agent that was never installed sees nothing. Do the inventory first, then put in writing which systems a provider may isolate on its own at 2am and who at your end handles cleanup. Adaptive's SOC is a managed Security Operations Center: endpoint and network telemetry, AI-triaged alerts, and expert response.

Two things the model leaves out. Hardware is quoted EXW Shenzhen, so your real line item is whatever landed cost and installation look like in your market, and the window itself needs power and a network path it probably does not have. The other is cadence: the case study went from 12 campaigns a year to 26 because extra campaigns became free, which doubles the creative someone has to produce. Adaptive Digital Signs runs Starter for getting on-screen fast, Silver for governed content at scale, and Gold for enterprise, around the clock.