Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

this! finally advice that includes some specific online things not just generic "pick up the phone and cold-call local businesses".

Another online possibility: throw up some Amazon (or similar) affiliate links to products and services, maybe even based on what people type (if that's accessible).

And next to them "opt out of the ads" link that goes to a donations website, to get fancy. Helps clear the conscience about having the ads in the first place.

Assuming this is GlasgowGPT (based on the timing of that bot taking off on /r/glasgow and this post, and your username), a challenge you'd likely have with advertising is that the content from the bot is, whilst funny, not very SFW.

One option to get the costs down would be to use a local LLM. It isn't likely to be as fast/good as GPT-3.5 but at least would give you a fixed cost per month (hosting).

If you had local hardware, given that traffic is going to be pretty low, if you have decent bandwidth at home and some hardware, you could even host there.

A simple way to monetize tools like this is to create a queue. You specify the amount of requests or concurrent sessions that you feel comfortable with, and then you make it possible to pay to «skip» the queue. This way people that really want to try it out will be able to be patient and wait out the queue, and the impatient rich people can pay for the rest.

My idea for something like this is just to have a donation pool. Once the donation pool dries up, the app stops sending OpenAI calls. There's still some cost to hosting the API, but it won't be $50/month.

If someone wants to do a SaaS for this kind of thing, that would be great too.

> One option to get the costs down would be to use a local LLM

It's not that cheaper if you want similar level quality and inference speed. For commercial usage, OP will require training his own model since no good commercial alternative exists.