Is switching from OpenAI APIs to hosted open-source models actually worth the extra effort?
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Our monthly api bills are getting pretty heavy and it's making us hesitate before testing new ai features.
We're thinking about hosting llama or mistral ourselves to cap costs, but we're worried the response quality won't match paid models and server setup will waste time.
If you host your own open-source models in production is the output quality good enough for real users?
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For the right jobs, yes. I moved the job post summaries on my crowdsourcing site to Qwen running locally, but only after checking its output for a while and making sure the quality held up. Profile writing still goes to Gemini Flash, since it's cheap.
A lot of people assume local models just make mistakes. You only really know once you've checked them on your own data, one job at a time.