I still don't understand why people are building things on top of OpenAI's APIs.<p>It's obvious that in the early days, they'll operate at a loss, with many free features and cheap premium features. It's a good time to try it out and see what it can do, but you can't build anything that relies on it, it's a rugpull waiting to happen.<p>They'll add moderation, raise prices, and you'll have to do the same, your users will leave and the ones who stay will hate you. This is only the beginning.<p>Use self-hostable open source alternatives even if they're less easy to use or require infrastructure, and plan for high electricity and storage bills. Whatever you build will last, as long as you respect your users and don't peek at the cleartext logs of users who didn't opt-in to that. It won't be easy.<p>If OpenAI keeps a monopoly on LLMs, they're gonna become like Microsoft did with Windows, but the enshittification process will be a thousand times faster.