[irfn]

Not sure what you run this on and why its $50/day but sounds like a lot.

Convert your server cost to a pay as you go model. You are currently paying even for time when your server is idle. Containerise your app and run on something like AWS Lambda which has a pay for what you use model.

- s3 is cheap for storing your model data and as long as you are just reading that should be fine.

- AWS Lambda has 1 million free invocations per month in free tier.

- Post that you pay $0.60 per 1 million requests

- AWS stack is just an example, you can easily use GCP Cloud run or any other equivalent service.

[mejutoco]

My guess is the 50$ come from the open api charges, not from the laravel app.

Can you cache some of the interactions and serve the cached version for the most common ones?

[gbasin]

the primary cost would be the OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo API, which is ~ $0.002 per 1k tokens

[laratied]

I have made a chatbot like this and I am not a software engineer.

The whole thing is trivial to make. The system prompt is trivial. I would even say it was harder to make a geocities page in the 90s than to make a chatbot like this.

3.5 turbo is great to play with but at scale it is brutal cost wise.

The real issue though is anyone who already has a working 3.5 turbo chatbot can knock this off in the next 5 minutes by just changing the system prompt.

I think this is the future though. The labor is pretty much trivial, the capital for tokens at scale is what matters.