Built our entire product on OpenAI's API. They changed their pricing and killed our margins.

When we launched our AI-powered writing assistant for B2B sales teams, we moved fast. We built our entire backend architecture directly on top of the OpenAI API. It was incredible—we could ship complex features in days, and our users loved the output. We priced our product at $29/month for 500 generations, which gave us a solid 60% margin based on OpenAI's older GPT-3.5 pricing.

Then, OpenAI released their new models and adjusted their pricing tiers. Overnight, the specific API calls we relied on got significantly more expensive for our usage volume.

I ran the numbers this morning, and it's a disaster:

• Our average user makes about 400 generations a month.

• Our cost to serve that user just jumped from $11 to $34.

• We are now losing $5 per user every single month.

We have 200 paying customers, which means we are bleeding $1,000 a month just to keep the lights on. To make matters worse, our prompts are highly customized to the older model's quirks, so migrating to a cheaper, open-source model would require rewriting months of prompt engineering and likely degrade the quality our users expect.

I completely fell into the "wrapper trap." I thought building on top of a massive AI provider was just smart, fast engineering. I didn't realize that my entire business model was at the mercy of a pricing update from a company that doesn't even know we exist.

For founders building AI wrappers: How are you protecting your margins against sudden API pricing changes?

Are you building abstraction layers to switch models easily? Are you locking in annual contracts with providers? Or is the "AI wrapper" business model just fundamentally flawed if you can't control your COGS?