Top 5 OpenAI API Alternatives Everyone Should Know About
Source: tai_blog

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 youre done.   But after some time  you encounter these problems:   Vendor lock-in: you have to use only the OpenAI models now  as you dont 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 dont 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 cant 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 cant use them for some specific use cases  even if you fine-tune them. And at any moment  they can decide that you didnt 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 lets find your perfect LLM provider!   We start off with the other LLM vendors like OpenAI. What I mean by these are companies similar to OpenAI  which trained their own models and shared an API to use them. Some popular ones include:   Claude AIMistral APIGemini APIGooseAIand others.These providers have more or less the same features as OpenAI  providing LLMs of different sizes  speeds and prices. To find a better one you have to manually check them and see if they are better for your specific use-case.   Another type of vendor is cloud vendors. Instead of training and providing their LLM to you  they instead provide the servers and GPUs to you. Some services (like Azure  Google Cloud and AWS) can also provide ready-to-use solutions  e.g. Azure OpenAI service. It may be more expensive compared to OpenAI  but the main advantage is complete privacy  and better customization. This server/deployed model is completely yours  and you can do whatever you want with it.   I have some experience with Azure  and from my experience you can also opt-out of any traces/security filters after some time  when you gain enough trust. This means that your inputs and outputs will be completely private. And since they have a partnership with OpenAI  they let you use different GPT models and other OpenAI products out of the box.   In the case of AWS  they provide all kinds of open-source models.   And for Google Cloud  they provides an API for Gemini.   4. InferkitNow to our 4th place  https://inferkit.ai. The main advantage of Inferkit (compared to OpenAI) is its price: as written on the main website  they provide the models with 50% off. Thats a great deal  right? Whats the catch?   As far as I know  there isnt one. Based on their description  Inferkit has made extensive engineering optimizations to the services of large model companies like OpenAI  LLama  and Anthropic  achieving more cost-effective and stable API access. There is no difference in the actual performance between the two.   In terms of privacy  they do not save prompts of the user  and all the basic user information is encrypted.   They also have a free tier  so you can try out their models without spending anything.   3. Together AITogether AI is very similar by its nature to Inferkit. They also offer different models  but they do have some advantages:   They give a possibility to fine-tune models;They provide not just LLM APIs  but also GPU servers and clusters for training and deploying your custom models;Compared to AWS and Google Cloud  they have better networking speed;They are overall more popular and reliable;They have way more models (mostly open-source ones  but there are 100+ available);They have a great documentation for every step you may need;Ability to opt-out of any prompt/inference data retention.The main downside is that there are no commercial models like GPT4  Claude and so on. Even though open-source models are getting better and better  the commercial ones are still on the top of performance.   2. OllamaThe second place is Ollama. Its main superpower is the ultimate privacy. Its just as private as it gets. The reason  all the models are self-hosted. Meaning  you download an app  install it on your PC and you get your own LLM  which doesnt send ANY data online  runs completely locally  and stores all your data on your own drive.   The installation process is pretty straightforward and well-documented.   They support the most popular OS (Windows  MacOS  Linux)  have all the open-source models you may need  and allow to use quantized models easily. There are also different frontend solutions supporting ollama  so you can get your ChatGPT experience at home.   So  in the end you get a completely free ChatGPT alternative. Depending on your GPU  you may even get a better performance compared to models like the GPT3.5 family.   Another upside is that you can customize it on your own  adding different RAG frameworks and tools to get better accuracy. So  instead of paying 20$ for a ChatGPT subscription  you can get a more feature-rich model that is completely private and uncensored for 0$ (excluding electricity bill).   The main downside is that you need a beefy PC to run it. Of course  with some small LLMs  you can just use your CPU and RAM  but the speed of the inference may not be so great.   1. OpenRouterFinally  we arrive to the first place  OpenRouter. I think that this is a great alternative because of the following reasons:   Huge collection of models. In contrast to TogetherAI  Openrouter has both open-source models and commercial models (including OpenAI  Claude  Gemini  Perplexity and so on);Its completely private depending on the model you choose  if you are using a commercial model  then usage policy is dependent on the vendor. But if you use a self-hosted model  your data is completely private  and if you want  you can store your inputs and outputs automatically  also tracing the price for every call;Fallback models. This built-in feature of OpenRouter is helping to error-proof your app: in case you call a model API and it doesnt work  it automatically tries a different model (of your choosing);Best for prompt models. OpenRouter has the possibility to call a best for prompt model  which means it automatically chooses LLM using your input. So  for simple tasks  it will choose a cheap and small model  while for more complex problems  it will take a more expensive one;Some other cool features include a free tier of 1$  free models (in the list of all the models  you can usually see a few models with 100% off. This is not a scam  and these models are temporarily free)  custom limits  LLM ranking table  other vendor integrations (like OpenAI API) and text-to-3D model API.   If you want to get started with OpenRouter  check out my previous article. It has a detailed description and code examples.   SummaryIn this article  we covered different LLM providers  interfaces and cloud vendors for LLM APIs. By listing all the advantages and disadvantages  its easier to choose a solution for your specific use case  which can make your LLM applications more private  secure  cheap  and performant.   For an easier comparison  I created a table:   Some comments:   Some of the values may be subjective;By cheap price  I meant the possibility of using cheap  small models;Openrouters free tier has yes++ as it provides some free LLMs;The fine-tune part means you can host your own fine-tuned models (e.g.  fine-tunes of open-source LLMs);Ollama has the best privacy because no data is stored anywhere except your server/PC.Have something to say? Write comments below  I would be happy to discuss them! Maybe you know better alternatives?   And if you have any feedback  also feel free to reach out. Im always glad to admit my mistakes and improve on them.   Sourceshttps://inferkit.aihttps://www.together.aihttps://ollama.comhttps://openrouter.ai