Top 5 OpenAI API Alternatives Everyone Should Know About

Artem Shelamanov
Towards AI
Published in
7 min readJul 24, 2024

We all know how easy it is to use OpenAI API. You get your API key, pip-install openai library, write 5 lines of code and you’re done.

But after some time, you encounter these problems:

  • Vendor lock-in: you have to use only the OpenAI models now, as you don’t have access to others. And if you want to switch to another provider, you would have to rewrite your codebase.
  • High prices: even though OpenAI models are great, they come with a pretty high price. And when you have thousands or millions of users, you will burn through your money extremely fast.
  • 1 point of failure: whenever OpenAI servers go down, so does your app. And you don’t have any other alternatives. This is also a problem if, for example, they decide to raise their prices: you would have no choice but to comply.
  • No privacy: OpenAI explicitly write that they store your data. You can’t opt out of it, and some third parties can access it.
  • Some use-cases are disallowed: OpenAI models are highly censored, which means that you can’t use them for some specific use cases, even if you fine-tune them. And at any moment, they can decide that you didn’t comply to the usage policy and revoke your access.

All these problems lead to one point: you need to at least be aware of existing alternatives. Every solution has its own advantages and disadvantages, so let’s find your perfect LLM provider!

Published in Towards AI

The leading AI community and content platform focused on making AI accessible to all. Check out our new course platform: https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev

Written by Artem Shelamanov

Data Scientist, Computational Physicist and Game Developer. Check my linktree: https://linktr.ee/ash_dot_py

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?