Making minimalist chatbot iOS app so I don't have to pay $20/mo for premium LLM subscription
Paying a fixed $20 cost per month for a LLM subscription like Anthropic or ChatGPT makes sense if your usage is predictably high month over month. If your usage is lumpy — with some high months and some low, it’s probably more cost effective to use LLM API’s instead.
The App Store is full of ChatGPT clones — some of which prompt you for an OpenAI or Anthropic API key. These apps seem sketchy to me — you don’t know if your queries are being data mined1, and your API key (which is tied to your credit card) could be abused. It felt more secure to create my own chatbot front-end that calls an LLM endpoint.
Here is a link to the Github repo.
And short demo:
Closing thoughts
My app is very basic and doesn’t hold a candle to the UX of ChatGPT or Claude, so if anyone knows of a high quality, LLM-agnostic, secure chatbot frontend iOS apps that don’t require a subscription, please let me know!
There are good web apps but I’m not aware of any mobile ones.
You can’t really avoid this unless you run your own local LLM