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

Hello,

I'm an HN user for 5-6 years but I wanted to use an alt for this as it's a bit sensitive.

Last week I created a ChatGPT clone for my city. It's basically a laravel app hooked up to GPT3.5-turbo with a custom prompt that makes local references and talks in the way that people in my city talk.

It's been a surprise hit and now I've had 20,000 chats coming through in one day - people where I live really seem to love it

The problem is that I likely can't afford to keep hosting this. It's cost me $50/day for one day, and Adsense doesn't allow 'chat apps', so I'm at a loss at how to cover the bill for this app. I've already optimised the prompt and reduced the number of tokens I'm sending

The app a joke really, but it's a local joke that seems to be quite popular and connecting with my city. Should I try to raise donations? Is there an advertising provider I could use that would potentially cover the costs? Is there an alternative to OpenAI that is comparable to GPT-3.5 that I could self-host cheaper?

Any and all advice appreciated. I don't care about profit - I just want to keep the app online so people can enjoy it.

That’s enough traffic to attract local sponsorships.

I bet you could find local sponsors who can pay you on a monthly basis

Inform people to use ChatGPT through OpenAI's web interface and publish your prompt?

> It's been a surprise hit and now I've had 20,000 chats coming through in one day

> The problem is that I likely can't afford to keep hosting this. It's cost me $50/day for one day

If your traffic continues to increase at a rapid clip, you may want to look into investors for your project. You could still keep it mostly nonprofit if you think it is adding a lot of value for people.

I've been wondering how to create a ChatGPT-powered app and not have to spend a fortune on operating it. Use a cheaper model? Limit the input/output length? Train a custom model?