[HN Gopher] Show HN: ServerlessAI - Build, scale, and monetize A...
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Show HN: ServerlessAI - Build, scale, and monetize AI apps without
back end
Hello HN, I've always loved building frontend-only apps--those you
can prototype over a weekend, host for free on GitHub Pages, and
scale to millions of users. Unfortunately, AI-enabled apps
complicate things, as exposing your OpenAI key to the world is
obviously a no-go. This also means mobile developers often have to
run their own servers. That's why I built ServerlessAI, an API
gateway that lets you securely call multiple AI providers directly
from client side using OpenAI-compatible APIs. You can authenticate
users through any identity provider, like Google or Apple, and set
per-user request or spending quotas. You can also define an
allowlist for endpoints and models. To monetize, you can apply
different quotas for various user tiers. To start, I recommend
checking out our tutorials, where we walk you through building a
complete, deployment-ready AI app in 5 minutes. We've got tutorials
for React, Next.js, and iOS:
https://serverlessai.dev/docs/tutorials/ Our long term vision is
to offer the best toolkit for AI developers at every stage of their
project's lifecycle. If OpenAI / Anthropic / etc are AWS, we want
to be the Supabase / Upstash / etc. We are building optional out-
of-box tools for authentication and payment management, so you can
roll out your prototype faster. In the future, we want to provide
the best prompt engineering tools for fine-tuning, A/B testing, and
backtesting, as well as the best observability tools. We'd love to
hear your feedback. Thanks for stopping by!
Author : HeavenFox
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-10-07 12:37 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (serverlessai.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (serverlessai.dev)
| sf-wy wrote:
| Great idea! I like the ergonomics of this for the developer-side,
| it's easy to add and puts the onus on the developer to have a
| robust auth system that avoids users creating 1000s of accounts
| so they can get unlimited LLM access.
|
| One challenge on frontend-only apps is if the prompt is
| proprietary then this will be exposed unless you will then offer
| prompt templating or prompt mapping on your side i.e. the
| frontend says prompt: Template_123 and then this maps to the
| actual prompt somehow. Prompting is important still and maybe for
| a while so having the internals externally available could be
| sensitive.
| ProofHouse wrote:
| I disagree. These sorts of pricing structures rule out consumer
| usage quickly due to high numbers of users. Have flat usage
| fees and get rid of these per user limits. Both doesn't make
| sense unless you want to turn away any app that has many users.
|
| I'd also recommend they clean up the copy of what they offer
| (expand on the why).
|
| Other than that looks cool
| HeavenFox wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is something we are
| iterating on. Our intention is that we only make money if our
| customers make money - which is why only authenticated users
| count towards the limit.
|
| If pricing is preventing anyone from using our product,
| please shoot me an email (in my HN profile) and we'd love to
| hear about your use case!
|
| Good call on the marketing copy! We will do some revisions!
| HeavenFox wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! We are building prompt templates right
| now. Besides the security benefits you mentioned, this can also
| enable developers to tweak prompts without redeployment, run
| A/B tests, and evaluate different models. It's an incredibly
| powerful tool!
| friendly_chap wrote:
| Hah! Nice idea! I built something with a similar mindset but
| instead of calling cloud AI providers my aim is to provide a
| self-hostable complete AI platform:
| https://github.com/singulatron/singulatron
|
| I know that might sound like putting the server back to
| serverless. But I would say it's being your own serverless
| provider - once you have the platform installed on your servers
| you can build frontend-only AI apps on top.
|
| Hope you don't mind the self-plug. Your approach definitely a ton
| of advantages when starting out (no infra to manage etc).
| madamelic wrote:
| To potentially save you some headache, take a look at
| serverless.com and weigh the likelihood they come after you about
| that name if you are planning on making this a business.
|
| (And yes, I hate their name too. I don't honestly know how
| defendable an entire technology term actually is. It also results
| in terrible Googling.)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| IANAL, but since "Serverless, Inc." chose a generic term for
| their trademark, usually this means only very specific
| instances of that mark are enforceable, e.g. "Serverless
| Framework", "serverless.com" and "Serverless, Inc." But if a
| company were to say "We make it really easy to use serverless
| technologies in the cloud!" (note lower case s), that shouldn't
| be infringing because it's just using serverless as a generic,
| descriptive term.
|
| "ServerlessAI" and "serverlessai.dev" shouldn't be infringing
| because they incorporate the generic term in their mark, not
| the Serverless Framework-specific term. Of course, this means
| that ServerlessAI would have the same issues you point out - a
| less-defensible mark and poor Google results.
|
| Also, in the US pretty much anyone can sue for anything, so
| even if you're in the right it can be an expensive headache to
| have to defend yourself.
| HeavenFox wrote:
| Thank you both! In a way this could be a nice problem to have
| - attracting the attention of BigCo means we are big enough
| right ;) But yes, we will definitely be prepared for that
| possibility!
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Nice problem to have if you happen to be serverlessai's
| lawyers, if you happen to be serverlessai's investors,
| probably not.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| This is a great idea. You should market to app devs as well.
|
| I would also build this on top of firebase marketplace:
| https://extensions.dev
| HeavenFox wrote:
| Thank you! We do believe app developers will find this
| valuable, and we are also working on IAP integration. Sadly I
| am not an app developer, so if anyone have any suggestions on
| how I can serve this community better, I'm eager to hear from
| you! My email is in my HN profile.
|
| Will look into Firebase Marketplace! That is a great
| suggestion!
| ukuina wrote:
| This is cool, congrats on launching!
|
| How is it different from Puter AI, which offers auth + free
| inference?
|
| https://docs.puter.com/AI/chat/
| ent101 wrote:
| Founder of Puter here. Thank you very much for mentioning us!
| HeavenFox wrote:
| Thanks! Despite my best Google-fu, I didn't find Puter in my
| market research :) It is a very interesting project for sure!
|
| Looking at Puter's offering, at the end of the day, we serve
| the same goal of making developer's life easier. ServerlessAI
| is more narrowly focused on AI use cases, while Puter is
| providing a more generic app runtime. Both have their best use
| cases!
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you don't want to pay for this service, keytrustee.org does
| this for free.
| stroupwaffle wrote:
| Please hire a real artist those graphics on the home page are
| disturbing.
| jrm4 wrote:
| So, I'll be honest, I don't understand this market. I get that
| one can be profitable selling shovels during the gold rush, sure.
| But I have trouble understanding who is knowledgeable/dedicated
| enough to try to get their AI app going, but would pay to
| abstract/outsource this part of the chain.
|
| (I suppose, relately, I have trouble understanding why anyone
| would just sort of presume OpenAI would be forever the best
| backend here as well?)
| HeavenFox wrote:
| Here's my hypothesis: since we are still in the gold rush phase
| of AI, going to market early and pivoting quickly is
| imperative. Therefore, it is worthwhile to focus on your
| differentiating factor and outsource everything else. Plus we
| use the OpenAI API format, so there isn't vendor lock-in -
| though we hope we provide enough value for you to stay!
|
| And you are right on the money that OpenAI may not be the best
| backend forever. That's why we also support Anthropic, Groq,
| and Mistral.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| A friend of mine works for a very large company and he was
| telling me about an AI startup they bought for (he thinks) in
| the ballpark of 8 digits. After they were on boarded he was
| able to dig into what it was. It's literally a GPT backend with
| system prompts and RAG. If you have a good sales team you can
| print money for doing almost nothing right now.
| __alias wrote:
| I've seen an AI yearbook photos styled app print money that was
| serverless.
|
| There's lots of novelty apps atm that, as the other commented
| stated, just want to get to market as soon as possible to
| validate an idea
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Doesn't everyone ask this question about Okta, like what am I
| doing farming out my user login?
| Voloskaya wrote:
| Lots of company are doing this exact business, they all have
| insane churn rate.
|
| Biggest use case seems to be for people who want to prototype
| something quickly, they don't yet want to bother with managing
| the infra and don't mind the extra cost since this will be
| running at small scale. But if the experiment is successful,
| then the customer churns as it (most of the time) makes little
| sense to scale ML on serverless. And if the experiment is not
| successful, they are obviously also going to churn.
| crooked-v wrote:
| So what's supposed to make this service better than OpenRouter
| (https://openrouter.ai), which has an extensive list of available
| models with transparent pricing for all of them?
| jstanley wrote:
| Perhaps:
|
| > You can authenticate users through any identity provider,
| like Google or Apple, and set per-user request or spending
| quotas. You can also define an allowlist for endpoints and
| models. To monetize, you can apply different quotas for various
| user tiers.
| jedberg wrote:
| Hey, not sure where you're running your backend for this, but
| this is the perfect use case for my company's product (check out
| my profile if you're interested). We make a serverless compute
| platform that doesn't charge for wait time, so it would be
| signifigantly cheaper than EC2 or AWS Lambda for example.
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