> running things in production/self hosting is more annoying than just paying like 20-200/month
This is an important point. As people rely more on AI/LLM tools, reliability will become even more critical.
In the last two weeks, I've heavily used Claude and DeepSeek Chat. ChatGPT is much more reliable compared to both.
Claude struggles with long-context chats and often shifts to concise responses. DeepSeek often has its "fail whale" moment.