Open-weight or proprietary: a build decision for small teams

A hosted API puts a working model behind your feature in a day; standing up open weights adds infrastructure, autoscaling, and an on-call rotation before you serve a single request.1

For a team of twelve with a quarter-long deadline, that gap is the whole story: the fastest path to learning from real users wins, and self-hosting spends the first weeks on plumbing rather than the product.4

At low and spiky volume, metered API pricing is cheaper than the fixed cost of reserved GPUs plus the engineering time to keep them busy.2

The crossover arrives only once usage is high and steady enough to amortise that fixed cost. Most teams cross it later than they expect, and some never do.2

Open weights are the stronger answer when data residency, offline use, or a guaranteed exit path are hard requirements rather than preferences.3

The real lock-in is rarely the model; it is the prompts, evals, and glue built around one provider. Keep those portable and switching stays cheap.3