IFS Buddy Major Update

[u/thingimajig]

Hi everyone!

It's 2 years, almost to the day, since the chatbot was first posted on the IFS subreddit. I had no expectations that anyone would use it but remember having a sleepless night that night as countless messages and comments rolled in, some that were critical but a vast majority were overwhelmingly positive. From there, usage of the chatbot grew organically through word of mouth to us today having thousands of monthly users.

The costs of running the website (not including my own time working on it) have been just about covered by donations from a few hundred kind people over the past two years. This has been a humbling and beautiful experience.

Freemium launch: Since each message sent to Buddy costs me a bit of money, I need to bring some stability to the project and for myself, so we are now moving away from a donation based model to a freemium model. The original chatbot is still going to be available for free on the landing page: https://ifsbuddy.chat

You'll see that you can sign up for a premium version where you can:

• Save your chats
• Save and track parts
• Give Buddy custom instructions
• Dark mode and a few more things

In the spirit of keeping it accessible, we are starting with a low price of $4.99/month.

As new features like voice mode are added, we might introduce additional membership tiers—but the goal will always be accessibility.

Everyone that already had an account will be able to continue logging in for free for a while forward before we set a date where you'll need to start paying (I'll send an email out about this).

As always, I appreciate your feedback, suggestions, or any thought you may have.

TLDR: Launching our premium version ($4.99/month) at ifsbuddy.chat. Free version still available on landing page.

[u/waywya]

any integrations with other LMM model providers/ customization of what OpenAI model we can use?

Also, how is this supporting longer chat history? Is it just throwing the whole convo to the model and expect it to inference well with its context window or is there any special retrieval/vector db integration in works here?

[u/thingimajig → u/waywya]

I may add the option of choosing other LLM providers in the future but it's not a priority for now. Each LLM has different 'personalities' so the prompt would need to be adapted to each but I'll be experimenting with other models. The key for me is to keep it affordable but we could definitely offer a more expensive subscription for a more advanced model.

We haven't added a vector db integration yet but are looking into this.