My Discord bot has one job: when someone pastes a stack trace into our server's #help channel, it rewrites the trace into a plain-English explanation plus a likely fix. It ran for months on a paid LLM API at a few dollars a month — small money, but the kind that nags you when the workload is trivially bursty: silent for days, then thirty requests in an evening when a game update breaks everyone's mods.
So I pointed it at a free endpoint instead. The migration took an afternoon. The consequences of the migration took two weeks to fully shake out, because nothing failed loudly. Everything failed slightly. This is a log of the five things that broke, what each one taught me about provider portability, and the wrapper code that now sits between my bot and any LLM endpoint so I never have to debug these twice.
The endpoint I moved to is MonkeyCode, which offers free model access and a free server option — the right price shape for a hobby bot with spiky traffic. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. Every failure below, though, is generic to switching OpenAI-compatible providers. I verified that by deliberately reproducing two of them against a second endpoint. Treat this as a portability field report, not a product review.
