Everything's a tradeoff, but it seems that part of the tradeoffs include access to tools critical for your product to function correctly being taken away without a way to get it back. Maybe that can be an acceptable tradeoff, but I'd personally not like living with that.
At present, my startup isn't making money - in fact, it's not even released. As a result, I'm trying to prioritize getting it out of the door while still being affordable for myself enough to bootstrap it.
To do this, I've made, and continue to make tradeoffs. Among many of the tradeoffs I'm currently making that I intend to resolve ASAP is having OpenAI as a single source of failure. I intend to have some of the other hosted solutions as other options for LLM processing. One of the many, many options that will be considered at that time is self-hosting it, as well, as another option.
I've already spent more time than I should perfecting various smaller pieces, increasing reliability, etc. Each time I choose perfection, I lose more time, more runway, more potential market share; and, something I've recently had to learn:
Each time I lock myself in a previous step to get that step perfect, I miss the lessons I'm about to have to learn in the next stage of the process, including new issues I'll run into that increase the next step's complexity above my initial estimates.
Everything is a tradeoff. Choosing to use a commercially available solution with known and relatively set costs while accepting it may slowly change underfoot (while also knowing I have alternatives I can swap to if an emergency comes up that should only take a little bit to transfer to) is one I've made.
