Tall crate = hard requestDark crate, padlock = privateGreen slice = KV cache in useGrey slabs = model weightsRed beacon = dock shutA sorting yard before your AI box. Each crate is one request. The gate is the router, such as LiteLLM. It picks the local box or the cloud dock.The local box is an RTX 5090 with 32 GB of VRAM that holds Qwen3 32B at GGUF Q4_K_M (19.9 GB of weights, 1 GB of overhead). Each slot reserves a 4,096-token KV cache (1.07 GB), so 7 slots fit inside 90% of VRAM. One decode step reads the weights once plus the cache of every busy slot, and gives each busy slot one token, so each slot gets 0.7 × 1,792 GB/s ÷ (19.9 GB + busy × 0.54 GB): 61 tok/s alone, 53 tok/s with all 7 slots busy. The gate sends a request to the dock only when fallback is on, the dock is open, and the request is not private; hard requests (20% of the mix, 900 tokens instead of 300) always go to the dock, easy ones go when every slot is taken. Users think for about 2 s after a reply. The cloud numbers are illustrative: Provider A is $4, B $1.50 and C $0.50 per million tokens, with 0.6 s, 0.9 s and 1.4 s to the first token at 140, 90 and 55 tok/s. A busy day is 4 hours and a month is 30 days. When the day's cost passes the monthly budget ÷ 30, the dock shuts for the rest of the day and the figure plays the day in 50 seconds: watch the TODAY needle reach the red tick. Latency is the wait in the queue plus the time in a slot or at the dock, without the belt rides. KV slices are drawn about twice as tall as their share of VRAM.