Is relying on OpenAI a business risk?
by Tom ClevelandHi IndieHackers! I recently launched a health search engine that uses several OpenAI endpoints to answer health questions using primary research. It's pretty cool!
But it got me thinking—is this a huge risk to my business? If I build something that's ~100% reliant on a third-party's APIs, it seems like there are some risks:
- They hike prices, ruining my business model
- They go out of business (seems unlikely at this point in the hype cycle, lol)
- They shut down my account for no reason (you hear about this with Google, Facebook, etc. sometimes)
Am I crazy? I know it's possible to spin up my own AI endpoints (using, e.g., HuggingFace), but it's pretty early in my startup journey and if feels like I should be spending time elsewhere.
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It is risky, yes. See what happened to @levelsio recently: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600861720687554560
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Never rely only on one thing. Doesn't matter if it is API, host or etc. If it dies, they ban you, or similar your whole business goes down and you can't give an estimate of when you will be back up.
