IMHO, at some point, it's just about trust.
Now, to be 100% honest, I'd love to release this as OSS, but my current business model is based on freemium. And, sell it as white-label for companies.
EDIT: if you have better idea, I'd love to hear about it.
I'm not saying change your ways, just consider being a bit less flippant when you say things like "IMHO, at some point, it's just about trust". As someone who seeks to profit from this, that's about the worst example you can give a prospective user like me.
My face is hot just having to type this.
Yes, but you are also literally going to multiply several billions numbers together and pray for a random outcome.
I don't know, maybe some middle ground would be feasible - like have the server-side part open-source, because that's the only part where anything harmful might be (and it's also fairly thin BTW).
But no matter what, the project needs to be profitable for me, sorry to say that, but let's be a bit realistic, you wouldn't work for free either.
It has value even if every person doesn't individually read every line.
Maybe your face is getting hot from trying to shame somebody into giving their work away for free?
Yes, and a big part of establishing trust is sending the right signals. The risk vs reward differential is way higher for open-source compared to closed source, so all other things being equal I would trust open-source more. Note that all other things are actually not equal in this case, e.g. your closest competition is open-source: Ollama, GPT4All, Llamero.
This probably isn't the best justification to use on tech forums. Odds are higher here and in similar forums that some of audience do indeed read the source code, do static analysis on them, check the libraries for CVEs, etc.
With that said, i'd never pay $5/m these days for something unless is had very good value to me and obvious ongoing costs i'm using (servers/etc) for the dev/company. Those costs would need to be clear though, not just "we chose to run some servers so that we'd have features which justified subscriptions"
I would however, pay for upgrades - ie the licensing model employed by JetBrains/etc. Which can come out to $5/m (or yearly purchases, etc), or w/e, but most importantly the software keeps working if you decide to cancel.
edit: Also i'm on Linux. Looks like i can't buy it anyway haha
But that makes OSS more complicated - people usually don't pay for something they can clone & build themselves.
BTW: Linux and Windows will definitely happen, I just didn't have time yet. Sorry, it's a lot of work and time so I had to pick macos first, and even that alone is a lot of testing on different configurations.
Ideally your app would be all FOSS components and i pay for the glue to tie it all together, but i've seen that become too easy to knock-off. Depends on the app of course. Still, FOSSing parts can do a fair amount of good will to the FOSS crowd, imo.