Here's the thing: i’ve been burned by vendor lock-in more times than I care to admit. There’s nothing quite like watching your carefully engineered pipeline crumble because some closed-source API changed its pricing overnight or deprecated a model you relied on. That’s why I’ve gone all-in on open source AI models—Apache 2.0 licensed ones, specifically. And if you’re still paying premium dollars for GPT-4o or Claude, let me show you why you don’t have to. In this post, I’m going to walk through