Hosting through z.ai and synthetic.new. Both good experiences. z.ai even answers their support emails!! 5-stars ;)
When z.ia launched GLM-4.6, I subscribed to their Coding Pro plan. Although I haven't been coding as heavy this month as the prior two months, I used to hit Claude limits almost daily, often twice a day. That was with both the $20 and $100 plans. I have yet to hit a limit with z.ai and the server response is at least as good as Claude.
I mention synthetic.new as it's good to have options and I do appreciate them sponsoring the dev of Octofriend. z.ai is a China company and I think hosts in Singapore. That could be a blocker for some.
I cancelled Claude two weeks ago. Pure GLM-4.6 now and a tad of codex with my ChatGPT Pro subscription. I sometimes use ChatGPT for extended research stuff and non-tech.
I've had much less luck with other agentic software, including Claude Code. For these kinds of tasks, only Codex seems to come close.
I haven't really stayed up on all the AI specific GPUs, but are there really cards with 300GB of VRAM?
My local HPC went for the 120GB version though, but 4 per node.
We are in this together! Hoping for more models to come from the labs in varying sizes that will fit on devices.
1. Donationware - Let's be real, tokens are expensive and if they ask for everyone to chip in voluntarily people wouldn't do that and Ollama would go bust quickly.
2. Subscriptions (bootstrapped and no VCs) again like 1. people would have to pay for the cloud service as a subscription to be sustainable (would you?) or go bust.
3. Ads - Ollama could put ads in the free version but to remove them the users can pay for a higher tier, a somewhat good compromise, except developers don't like ads and don't like pay for their tools unless their company does it for them. No users = Ollama goes bust.
4. VCs - This is the current model which is why they have a cloud product and it keeps the main product free (for now). Again, if they cannot make money or sell to another company Ollama goes bust.
5. Fully Open Source (and 100% free) with Linux Foundation funding - Ollama could also go this route, but this means they wouldn't be a business anymore for investors and rely on the Linux Foundation's sponsors (Google, IBM, etc) for funding the LF to stay sustainable. The cloud product may stay for enterprises.
Ollama has already taken money from investors so they need to produce a return for them so 5. isn't an option in the long term.
6. Acquisition by another company - Ollama could get acquired and the product wouldn't change* (until the acquirer jacks up prices or messes with the product) which ultimately kills it anyway as the community moves on.
I don't see any other way that Ollama can not be enshittified without making a quick buck.
You just need to avoid VC backed tools and pay for bootstrapped ones without any ties to investors.
qwe----3•3h ago
mchiang•3h ago
swyx•3h ago
homarp•36m ago
supporting models so ollama can then 'support' them too
if you use llama.cpp server, it's quite a nice experience. you can even directly download stuff from Huggingface.
speedgoose•2h ago
I don’t know how much Ollama contributes to llama.cpp
am17an•2h ago
CaptainOfCoit•6m ago
If nothing else, Ollama is free publicity for llama.cpp, at least when they acknowledge they're mostly using the work of llama.cpp, which has happened at least once! I found llama.cpp by first finding Ollama and then figured I'd rather avoid the lock-in of Ollama's registry, so ended up using llama.cpp for everything.