What's wrong with failover? I don't use anything from Anthropic except their API. So when Claude is having issues, I switch to GLM 5.3 or something, doesn't take more than a few seconds.
I realise people on the monthly plans can't do it as easily. But I would say that as far as possible, having a plan B is the foundation of resilience.
I think that's the 6 '9's problem. If you have something with 99% uptime, how much more are you willing to pay for 99.9% uptime, then 99.99% uptime. It's risk vs cost. Many places in the US do the same thing with things like say snow removal. Instead of having expensive systems ready to go for the 1-2 days of year of snow, you just shut things down for a day and slow down a little.
That doesn't work for all systems, and not for all businesses, but I would say the mass majority can 'suffer' 24 hours without email or an LLM without everything going up in flames.
It's not only a 9's thing. If you can set yourself up to easily switch between providers, you also put yourself in a better bargaining position.
That's not always easy to do, but with something like inference providers it is, so why not kill two birds with one stone?
Not hard on monthly plans either. I have ant, OpenAI and cursor (mostly for grok and gemiii). Taxonomy of model steps, each has a pre-tuned failover from a different plan and I just need to flip a switch when a lab goes down. Switch isn’t really required but occasional enough that I want eyes on and the system is only for my personal usage so outage until switch is acceptable…
Another reason to have good Evals…
Failovers are nice, something that all reliable systems will provide, and, most notably, exactly the opposite of "just adjust".