Why I Ditched Vendor Lock-In: An Open Source Dev's Take on AI API Strategy
Look, I've been writing code since before most "AI wrapper" startups existed. And nothing grinds my gears more than watching brilliant developers voluntarily chain themselves to a single provider's walled garden. It's the same mistake we made in the early cloud days, and we ended up paying for it for a decade.
So when a friend at a YC-backed startup asked me last month whether they should sign a direct enterprise contract with OpenAI or do something smarter, I wrote them this breakdown. Then I realised half my dev community would benefit from the same analysis. Here it is, cleaned up and with code samples.
The Core Problem Nobody Talks About
Here's the dirty secret most "enterprise AI strategy" blog posts won't tell you: the advice you get is almost always wrong for your stage. Guides written by vendor partners push you toward multi-year commitments. Guides written by indie devs assume you have the same constraints they do. Neither matches reality.
