Makes sense that this would be less beginner friendly so maybe you're correct that this is a P2 feature.
I guess I was thinking more in terms of pricing models and scaling up a service which is obviously a complicated decision for a startup so I'm not really sure what makes sense here. My rationale for wanting to buy/rent the model is that as a service scales it becomes increasingly important to own the model and the hosting. One of my concerns with building on top of a service like this is that it will potentially reach a chokepoint in the future. In general training a model is expensive and unique but hosting it is a commodity service. This will incentivize customers to use the service when they are small and then drop it when they grow to a certain size which is not necessarily ideal for either party.
In terms of keeping customers as they grow, our view (hope?) is that these models will be continually updated because of new annotations on their end, and from new training techniques on ours. And that concept of continuous improvement will push people toward a SaaS model.
When you say chokepoint, are you referring to cost, or latency, or something else?
Just spitballing here; these two would be the most convinent for the use-cases I have in mind.
Would love to talk more about your use case so we prioritize the right things for model export. Drop me a line (george at nyckel dot com).