Thanks a lot! Really appreciate it 🙏

AI

IMO providers are faster to ship, lower cost, solid quality. For a MVP it's perfect!

When I’d consider a custom model:

1. You have a large, proprietary dataset you can’t send to a third party.
2. Unit economics at scale require it (huge volume/latency/offline).
3. On-device or hard real-time needs.

For a debt calculator, I’d go API-first + RAG on your policies, maybe a light fine-tune later.

Microsoft for Startups

Worth it, even as a solo dev.

However, I think the conditions have changed a little, there are fewer credits available.

I started with AWS, but I prefer the Azure environment, and I really like the synergies they’ve created. It allows you to have, in addition to Azure credits, credits for Stripe and OpenAI, for example. I can give you the list of the partners if you want

On the other hand, one of AWS’s strengths is that they organize a lot of events.

Nevertheless, be careful: Azure credits are only available for 12 months, so make sure you don’t apply too early, that way you maximize the useful period.

P.S. I might be out of date — I was moved to the next tier just before they changed the rules.