September 30, 2026 · 7 min read
From 0.9B to 375B: Matching Open Models to Your Hardware (the K2 Horizon Lesson)
IFM shipped K2 Horizon as six models from 0.9B to 375B parameters — one for every hardware budget. Here is how to think about model-to-machine sizing, and what each tier costs on a Tampa AI VPS.
Most AI releases ask "how big is it?" K2 Horizon, IFM's September open-source fleet, asks a better question: "how big do you need?" Six foundation models from 0.9B to 375B parameters, released as one connected family, explicitly so teams can match reasoning depth to hardware constraints. As the operators of a tiered hosting platform, we endorse this worldview enthusiastically.
The sizing table we actually use
- 0.9B-class (edge tasks, classifiers, routing): runs on 1-2 vCPU / 2-4 GB. A $5.75 AI VPS hosts it with room to spare.
- 3B-8B quantized (chat, summarization, basic RAG): comfortable on 4 vCPU / 8-16 GB — the $16-32/mo tiers.
- 13B-32B quantized (serious reasoning, coding assistants): 8-16 vCPU / 32-64 GB, fast NVMe for weights — the top of the VPS range at $63.50.
- 70B+ and flagship fleets (375B-class): this is dedicated-server and colocation country. We will be straight with you: that conversation starts with bare metal, not a VPS.
Quantization is the great equalizer
Modern quantized builds (GGUF, AWQ and friends) trade a few points of benchmark accuracy for dramatic memory savings — frequently the difference between "needs a GPU cluster" and "runs on a 8 vCPU VPS." CPU inference on AVX-512 silicon has quietly become good enough for personal and small-team workloads. The model cards tell you the footprint; start one tier up from your guess and scale down.
The rest of the stack matters as much as the model
A self-hosted LLM without a chat UI, a vector store and an ingestion pipeline is a demo. K2 Horizon's fleet thinking applies to infrastructure too: one machine, one job, connected. That is why our AI VPS images pair the model runtime with the surrounding stack — Open WebUI in front, Qdrant or pgvector behind, n8n orchestrating — so the sizing conversation covers the whole system, not just the weights.
Try it this week
Pick a K2 Horizon tier, pick the matching box, and you are running in about 10 minutes from $5.75/mo — in Tampa, on hardware you root into. When your workload outgrows the tier, resize the box; when it outgrows VPS entirely, that is a colocation call we would genuinely enjoy.
Written for xShredo, drawing on ARPHost's infrastructure series · read the originals