I think one of the biggest struggles small startups and practitioners are facing is lack of a good option between "I wonder if this works" and "ready for prime time." Running locally is an option with consumer hardware but is cost prohibitive for a team. Cloud providers are full of complications and hidden costs. Tools like Friendli and Bento are good but ambiguous on costs and get difficult to price end-to-end once you need the full stack of options. Hugging Face inference endpoints and other tools still seem like the best option around along with cloud DBs like Zilliz.<p>That said, it's no wonder people just pay extra for the simplicity of a slightly smarter endpoint like OpenAI. Sure, over time the costs are insane and you lack any flexibility to create a truly targeted solution, but it <i>feels</i> like an all-in-one easy fix.