British fintech Revolut slashes AI coding costs 10x by cutting out Claude and going self-hosted

Revolut says that in less than a year it's managed to slash its AI coding inference costs by roughly 90 percent by making self-hosted models its default instead of relying primarily on commercial services like Claude.

Speaking at the AI Engineer conference in New York last month, David Abitbol, ops and infrastructure lead at the British fintech, described how it saw a 60 percent improvement in coding time and a 70 percent improvement in lead time following its rollout of AI coding tools to roughly 2,000 engineers. Revolut initially adopted GLM-5.1 before moving to GLM-5.3, which it now serves using 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs.

Prior to its switch to GLM, Revolut had been experimenting with AI, deploying Gemini in early 2025 and Claude Code in early 2026. "We were highly skeptical about the cost of AI. …