Downloading model weights does not automatically give unrestricted commercial rights or make the whole system open source. Read the actual licence and the material released with it. A proprietary hosted API offers a different arrangement: you buy access to a service and rely on its contractual terms, availability and change policy.
Compare a specific deployment
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| Question | Self-hosted model with available weights | Hosted proprietary API |
|---|---|---|
| Who operates it? | Your team or chosen operator | Provider runs the model service |
| Which costs remain? | Hardware/cloud, engineering, security and maintenance | Usage fees plus integration, evaluation and oversight |
| Which rights matter? | Commercial use, modifications and redistribution in the licence | Data terms, allowed uses, service changes and exit |
Do not use “open” as a shortcut
The Open Source Initiative’s AI definition addresses freedoms to use, study, modify and share, along with required information and components. Available weights alone are not sufficient. Neither self-hosting nor a provider contract automatically resolves rights in training data, confidential inputs or generated outputs.
Make switching measurable
- Run the same representative tasks on both options, with the same acceptance criteria. Record total cost, latency, failure handling and staff time—not just benchmark scores.
- Estimate migration work: data export, prompts, integrations, retraining and evaluation. The cheaper initial option may not have the cheaper lifetime cost.
Further reading
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