The most frustrating thing about the many, many clones of this exact type of idea is that pretty much all of them require OpenAI. Stop doing that. You will have way more users if you make OpenAI (or anything that requires cloud) the 'technically possible but pretty difficult art of hoops to make it happen' option, instead of the other way around. The best way to make these apps IMO is to make them work entirely local…
It's difficult to compete. A small business might answer 10,000 requests to their chat bot. The options are - Pay openai less than $50mo - Manage cloud gpus, hire ml engineers > $1000/mo - Buy a local 4090 and put it under someone's desk, $no reliability +$1500 fixed Any larger business will need scalability and you still can't compete with openai pricing. Maybe one of you startup inclined people can make an openllam…
I'm currently building www.lalamon.us specifically to provide a fully hosted open source model experience. One slight difference is that I'm providing a private chat instance for each user, so charging based on hours of active chat usage seemed to make more sense. Per-request charging seems more unpredictable for users, but I'd be interested in hearing the case either way.
Feel free to reach out with more questions if interested; my email is in my profile.