Comment by Tuna-Fish

Do not base products on models that are not open-weights. Doing it is like building a product on someone else's platform, you are entirely at their mercy, and even when they don't have any reason to hurt you, you are tiny enough that if any policy they want to enact hurts you as a side effect, no-one is going to care.

You don't have to self-host the open-weights model, you just need to be able to source it from multiple providers.

Using the closed vendor models maybe made sense when open-weight models lagged so far behind, but that time is now gone.