Frozen State Architecture: Maximizing the 2026 Per-Second Shift

The Persistence Hack: Snapshots

The biggest waste in cloud computing is paying for idle hardware. On most providers, a powered-off GPU instance still bills the full hourly rate because the chip is reserved.

Our Solution: Shrink and Freeze

1. Compress: We quantize models (Gemma, Llama) to fit smaller, faster footprints.
2. Snapshot: We save a block-level image of the OS and weights for a flat $0.06/GB/mo.
3. Destroy: We delete the compute instance, stopping the clock.

Why 2026 Changes Everything

Starting January 1, 2026, DigitalOcean moves to Per-Second Billing (60-second minimum).

• The Old Way: A 2-minute text generation cost $1.57 (1 hour minimum).
• The 2026 Way: That same task costs $0.05.

By running a fstrim command before shutdown, we ensure the snapshot only captures actual data, reducing a 500GB system to a ~$6.00/month storage baseline.