AI assistants and search decision
CheapChat
A competent technical user can replace CheapChat’s hosted UI and model-proxying by self-hosting an open-source conversational frontend (e.g., Chainlit or DocsGPT) wired to OpenAI APIs; you lose hosted billing/ops and multi-model convenience but not core capability.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off46 h to build
$45/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All CheapChat alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- User sends message → backend proxies to chosen LLM API → store conversation and tokens → render model response in chat UI.
What it still won’t have
- Hosted access to many pre-integrated model endpoints (model catalogue shown on site)
- Integrated billing and hosted account management
- Operational reliability, SLAs and vendor-run safety/monitoring
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
CheapChat does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal, self-hosted AI chat app using Python (FastAPI) backend, Chainlit for conversational UI, Postgres for conversation storage, Redis for short-term session state, and Docker Compose for deployment. Core features in scope: user sign-in (email link or single-user mode), model selector (support at least OpenAI), send/stream messages to backend proxy, store messages and token usage in Postgres, basic usage tracking endpoint, and an admin page to view conversations and usage. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing gateways, analytics dashboards, and enterprise SSO. Include error handling for API failures, retries, rate-limit backoff, and unit/integration tests for the proxy and DB layer. Provide Docker Compose, README with setup steps, and a simple script to seed a demo conversation.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productCheapChat — official product page
- open sourcesongquanpeng/one-api
- open sourceaingdesk/AingDesk
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
