
GlacierMD
A search engine for health nerds.
Hi 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.
About
Most health decisions are made by individuals (not doctors)—yet online health information is terrible. I built GlacierMD to make it easier for the average person to access practical, high-quality medical information.

2 Comments
It is risky, yes. See what happened to @levelsio recently: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600861720687554560
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.