The OpenAI Compatibility Tax: Why One API Rules Them All

"OpenAI didn't just build an API. They built the standard. Now every AI company pays the compatibility tax."

In 2023, OpenAI released ChatGPT and the world changed. But what most people don't realize is that an equally important shift happened in the developer ecosystem: the OpenAI API format became the de facto standard for all AI interfaces. Every model, every provider, every infrastructure company now speaks OpenAI.

How We Got Here

When OpenAI released their API, they made a series of design decisions: chat completions format, messages array, role-based turns, streaming via SSE, specific error codes. These weren't necessarily the best decisions—they were just the first decisions at scale.

Then something interesting happened: developers built tooling around these decisions. LangChain, LlamaIndex, Vercel AI SDK, and hundreds of other tools all assumed OpenAI's format. Switching costs became astronomical.

95%

SDKs OpenAI-compatible

Providers using format

∞

Lock-in depth

Standard setter

The Tax We All Pay

The "OpenAI Compatibility Tax" manifests in several ways:

Innovation constraints: New features must fit the OpenAI mold or be non-standard
API design debt: Suboptimal patterns get frozen into the standard
Competitive moats: OpenAI controls the spec everyone else follows
Migration friction: Switching providers is easy, switching formats is hard

Legacy Infrastructure

Pre-Standard Era

Every provider had unique APIs. Integration hell, but innovation freedom.

Infe Architecture

OpenAI Standard Era

Universal compatibility. Easy switching. But one company sets the rules.

Why We Embrace It Anyway

Despite the philosophical objections, the OpenAI format won for good reasons. Developer experience matters more than purity. Compatibility enables competition. And frankly, the format is... fine. It works.

The Infe Approach

100% OpenAI-compatible. Zero lock-in.

We speak the standard fluently so you can switch from OpenAI with one line of code. Your existing code, SDKs, and tooling just work. No migration pain.

The Future of Standards

Will we always live in OpenAI's shadow? Maybe not. As multimodal and agentic patterns emerge, there's an opportunity for new standards to develop. Tool calling, structured outputs, and streaming patterns are still being defined.

Drop-In Replacement

Change your base URL from api.openai.com to api.infe.io. That's it. Your code works instantly. No SDK changes, no format migrations, no compatibility testing.

For now, we embrace the OpenAI compatibility tax. Not because we love it, but because fighting it means fighting your existing code. And we'd rather fight latency.