Freemium is a potentially interesting model for app developers. If you're small enough to be in the free tier, you can avoid the risk of someone turning your app into the next backend for Chipotlai Max and running up your AI bill.

Once you get enough downloads to where Apple starts wanting to charge you money, you can consider switching to OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Deepseek or whatever. Sounds like they've even made that relatively easy to do in the Foundation Models framework -- just implement the LanguageModel protocol. I expect open-source or provider-written adapters to pop up that would let you use your vendor of choice.