[taneq]

> X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts.

I think it's more accurate to say that it allows you to borrow X. It's very true that it helps to bootstrap your own product and eventually if things work out you can bring X in-house.

My worry about everything-as-a-service is that until that point, each different service that you use is an another vulnerability to your product. This goes double for specialized services like AI, where unless you already have experts in that field, you're unlikely to have the expertise to replicate the service in-house. (Although by that same token, in this case without the service you couldn't provide your product anyway.)

[Joeri]

There's little risk of depending on external services if you use multiple that provide the same type of service hidden behind an abstraction layer and can remove one of the vendors from the mix with the press of a key.

[onion2k]

That mitigates the risk of depending on services, but it introduces a huge new risk by committing development time to a feature that provides no value to the user and potentially, if the providers last, no value to the business either.

Any startup founder who follows this strategy is concentrating on the wrong thing. Pick the provider who's most likely to last and build against their service. That way you are more likely to fail than they are.

[taneq]

You're conflating "using an external product" with "using an external service". The third option is self-hosting a third-party product, which gives you the best of both worlds (reduced development cost and time, reduced risk due to continued reliance on third party).

[mbrock]

But that seems very difficult when the service provided is a black box of artificial intelligence.