H2 planning forced a clearer trade-off: API convenience versus control, privacy, and predictable unit cost on self-hosted stacks.

Instead of an ideological open-versus-closed debate, score your top use case on latency, privacy, and monthly volume. That scorecard is the decision.

Many teams run a hybrid: closed APIs for experiments and spiky load, open or local for sensitive data and steady volume.

Cost is not only token price; include engineering time, monitoring, and recovery from outages.

Manager action: Score your top use case on latency, privacy, and monthly volume; pick open or closed from that scorecard.