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

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

#91

Post by mejutoco »

irfn wrote: post #88

Not sure what you run this on and why its $50/day but sounds like a lot. Convert your server cost to a pay as you go model. You are currently paying even for time when your server is idle. Containerise your app and run on something like AWS Lambda which has a pay for what you use model. - s3 is cheap for storing your model data and as long as you are just reading that should be fine. - AWS Lambda has 1 million free i…

My guess is the 50$ come from the open api charges, not from the laravel app.

Can you cache some of the interactions and serve the cached version for the most common ones?

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

#92

Post by Davidzheng »

kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #25

Congrats on having a side project that is popular enough to break the bank - it's stressful to be sure, but you're a cut above the rest. > I've already optimised the prompt and reduced the number of tokens I'm sending Lets assume you've found, or will find, all possible technical optimizations for your AI spend on ChatGPT. You can: * Ask for donations * Accept a $50/day cost for X days as a market research budget to…

[flagged]

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

#93

Post by xwdv »

bemmu wrote: post #78
austhrow743 wrote: post #21

There will be local businesses with fairly aggressive marketing. Tons of billboards, on buses, local newspaper, etc. Should be easy to find because they're the ones advertising everywhere. Call them up one by one and say "hey I run [project] that everyone has been using lately, would you be interested in having your business name listed as a sponsor? It'll be shown on 1/4 page loads which is currently 5000 times a da…

Whether this works depends on how comfortable the dev is picking up the phone. I had a local site and was just too terrified to do this, so I just kept my site up unmonetized (unlike OP it wasn't costing anything). One day two salespeople contacted me and suggested taking over ad sales, and managed to sell thousands (I think it was somewhere between $5k-$10k/month, but it was a long time ago) a month in ads for the s…

Yea this is important. A dev should absolutely not be picking up any kind of phone and talking to any kind of customer. This is a job for sales people. If some nervous dev could manage to make any kind of sale at all, then that means a trained professional salesperson can do probably 10x that much.

Don’t think just because you are very smart you can do sales. This is like business people trying to “learn coding” so they can put together some huge product. It doesn’t work well and isn’t scalable.

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

#95

Post by wombatpm »

Ankaios wrote: post #22
austhrow743 wrote: post #21

There will be local businesses with fairly aggressive marketing. Tons of billboards, on buses, local newspaper, etc. Should be easy to find because they're the ones advertising everywhere. Call them up one by one and say "hey I run [project] that everyone has been using lately, would you be interested in having your business name listed as a sponsor? It'll be shown on 1/4 page loads which is currently 5000 times a da…

Or charge even more for product placement in your project's prompts.

Or charge to remove the casual references to how product X sucks

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

#98

Post by batch12 »

Ankaios wrote: post #22
austhrow743 wrote: post #21

There will be local businesses with fairly aggressive marketing. Tons of billboards, on buses, local newspaper, etc. Should be easy to find because they're the ones advertising everywhere. Call them up one by one and say "hey I run [project] that everyone has been using lately, would you be interested in having your business name listed as a sponsor? It'll be shown on 1/4 page loads which is currently 5000 times a da…

Or charge even more for product placement in your project's prompts.

Could do it like radio/podcast ads too. "Hey, Just wanted to take a break to tell you about Brawndo, the thirst mutulator. It's got electrolytes, you see and..."

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

#99

Post by stanleydrew »

ke88y wrote: post #59

You could try to apply for grants. 20K+ chats sounds like a large number -- you must live in a 1M+ person metro area, right? It would probably be fairly easy to get a four figure grant from one agency or another. You could frame it as "localization of generative ai to the regional culture of X", or as a tourism thing, etc. You could also sell advertising the old-fashioned way -- ask local businesses or perhaps a loca…

Grants will take a long time to lock down I suspect. Maybe fine if you can float the cost for a few months and reimburse yourself out of grant funds later, but there's a lot of uncertainty.

$50/day is pretty small relatively speaking, so just finding a local corporate sponsor and running an ad for them would probably work.

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

#100

Post by avereveard »

I asked gpt for and it say partner with local business to promote them in exchange for some support. Have them give you coupons, so that they can track roi. Bill them ten cents or smth for every coupon uttered by your model. You can also make it fun, like a treasure hunt, but there are also other gamification opportunities.
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