Reddit soft launch for unhosted models
“We had a few members of the committee just posted on on Reddit essentially to some of the existing AI committees because we knew that we wanted to to serve the models that no one else hosted.”
Founder conversation
How Featherless AI Passed $250K a Month Hosting 6,700 Open AI Models
Eugene Cheah explains how Featherless AI grew from a Reddit soft launch to more than 10,000 customers on flat-rate access to open models.
Eugene Cheah · Featherless AI
Published July 1, 2026About this resource
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Eugene Cheah, CEO and co-founder of Featherless AI, explains how the platform offers flat-rate access to thousands of open models on Hugging Face and grew from a Reddit soft launch to more than 10,000 customers. He describes a team of 27, the plan to win startups burning heavily on OpenAI and Anthropic credits, and a largest customer paying $1-2M a year.
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Pricing experiment outgrew the parent
“But within the first few days, it became more profitable and more revenue than the original company platform that we were like, I guess we are fabulous now.”
Cutting startup AI bills in half
“We we can lower your bill by half, and and and we can see where it goes.”
Why support every fine-tuned model
“There are more than a 100 companies on earth. You want an infrastructure tailored to be able to handle all these various fine tunes.”
Largest customer pays $1-2M a year
“So currently the biggest will be around 1 to $2,000,000 a year, which may sound extremely large, but when you actually peel behind the layers, it only comes to around like five, six of the largest servers you see in the market.”
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Eugene Cheah
CEO & Co-Founder · Featherless AI
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