Show HN: Create your own finetuned AI model using Google Sheets
27 comments
·April 30, 2025Centigonal
Your biggest obstacle is proving fine-tuning is more effective than prompting, workflow design, RAG, etc during the initial pass. Most of my customers are still getting big improvements by picking the low-hanging fruit with those approaches. A much smaller fraction is at a place where they're ready to start fine-tuning. Obviously, this will change as AI programs mature.
manidoraisamy
Exactly! Finetuning needs at least 10 examples to even work. That’s why Promptrepo begins with prompting and schema-based generation when teams have little or no data. As they gather more examples, it gradually shifts to fine-tuning. It’s the classic cold start problem and we’ve simplified it for product teams who want to launch quickly but improve accuracy over time.
scosman
What’s the thinking of spreadsheet first? Just making it super accessible for people who already have data?
I’m building a UI for fine tuning (and evals, and synthetic data gen) - https://github.com/Kiln-AI/Kiln - and went the custom UI route. From chatting with folks - most people don’t have datasets, and need help building them.
manidoraisamy
It depends on the use case. For many business workflows, where structured data is key - spreadsheets are already the source of truth. But for chat-based or unstructured tasks, a custom UI might make more sense.
rgbrgb
Incredibly crowded space, but this is a great insight and UI... engineers probably have to integrate the model but we should empower non-technical customer-facing people to give feedback to the model in a way that improves it.
The blocker for me (and likely other cost-conscious early stage groups)? I have free credit and existing integrations with more mainstream platforms (OpenAI, anthropic, together). Trying this out will cost both eng time and money, so I won't be an early adopter. I wonder if there's a way to pass the cost through / use my API keys with credits. Maybe it's more for enterprise teams or cases where you're already confident about the fine-tuning approach.
Anyway, congrats on the launch!
manidoraisamy
Thanks! Yes, that's a popular request from other developers as well. That's why our basic plan is self managed plan (Bring your own OpenAI account) - https://promptrepo.com/finetune/pricing.html
We have one month free trial as well. Free free to ping me if you need more time.
ipaddr
I don't like the pricing. $38 a month headline much smaller billed annually with the price more than doubling. This is the trick your customers strategy and hope for no chargebacks.
QueensGambit
I understand your concern. We’ve had cases where short-term users abused our product for phishing, which led us to remove the monthly plan initially. To address that without locking out genuine users, we’ve added an option to extend the trial for up to 3 months before choosing a monthly or yearly plan. Feel free to message me if you’d like more time.
heresjohnny
Neat! Wonder though if you should be even offering the BYO option as a separate lite package. As a dev I would not buy this and as a non-tech person I would be confused by your pricing page.
But I do see the value! Think sales or marketing folks looking to get a bit more hands on. These will likely be your first visitor and be okay with your 50 dollar price. Then, their IT department will say “we want to hook up our own API key for that,” to which you can confidently say “sure, we can do that too.”
N=1, just my two cents. Good luck!
littlestymaar
Why Google Sheet though? Why would you want your customers to give their training data to Google?!
QueensGambit
Don’t want to sound like a shill, but Google doesn’t use data from your Google Sheets to train its models or for advertising. By default, your data stays private and is protected under Google Workspace’s privacy policies.
nbbaier
Heads up I get "ERR_CONNECTION_RESET" when navigating to https://promptrepo.com/finetune
manidoraisamy
Thanks for the heads up. Looks like a traffic spike from HN. Can you please check now?
nbbaier
Still down for me but I bet it's the traffic spike still. I'll check back in later!
labrador
How is this different than OpenAI projects?
manidoraisamy
Can you please clarify what you mean by "OpenAI projects"? Are you referring to the playground or the API for prompting or fine-tuning?
labrador
In OpenAI Pro ($20/mo) one can start a project with a set of files. Various chats can be had about this project topic with the files providing additional information. I've discovered the projects are isolated. They'll use memory configurable in settings but they don't use chat history outside the project. This can give ChatGPT chats in projects a different tone.
My question is this: Is this fine tuning with those project documents or RAG and what's the difference?
manidoraisamy
Thanks for the clarification. OpenAI projects in ChatGPT are meant for end users to get personalized help using their own documents, inside the ChatGPT UI.
Promptrepo is for developers and product teams to build new AI-powered features in their product. It’s about creating custom models that run behind the scenes in apps, not just improving a personal chat experience.
So while OpenAI projects use RAG for better chats, Promptrepo helps teams build and deploy fine-tuned APIs that serve structured outputs like JSON, labels, or extracted fields to build your own AI powered product.
justanotheratom
FineTuning Ops platform requirement - compare evals, latency, cost across models.
manidoraisamy
We don’t have automated evals, latency, or cost comparisons yet. But, Promptrepo does offer versioning and lets you deploy the same model across providers for comparison. Automating these comparisons is definitely on our roadmap.
mogili
Essentially this is a frontend to automate the process of converting a csv file into jsonl and pass through a fine-tuning service.
manidoraisamy
Yeah, just like Dropbox was a passthrough for aws s3.
Edit: Sorry about the snide comment. But if this ends up as a simple utility for finetuning, I would be happy with that too. Just want to share a tool that's been very useful in building ai features in our products.
ivape
That's the biggest problem with showcasing to developers. They are just not representative of the user base at large. For example, any Desktop application showcased will getting annihilated for being Electron. You very much take a risk putting it out to developers first because they will leave commentary about your product in this way (forever, this is the internet, it's not going anywhere). We eat out our own basically.
mogili
I am not saying there isn't value for this, just saying what it does. I might actually use this if they don't tie the fine tuned models to only be used within their platform.
ivape
This is awesome, I don't have a fine-tuning use case yet, but I can't imagine something being easier than a spreadsheet.
rallyvite
Agree, not super familiar with this space but that you are using GS as the UI makes this super accessible to so many more people given familiarity and low intimidation factor. Best of luck.
null
Hello HN,
We built Promptrepo to make finetuning accessible to product teams — not just ML engineers. Last week, OpenAI’s CPO shared how they use fine-tuning for everything from customer support to deep research, and called it the future for serious AI teams. Yet most teams I know still rely on prompting, because fine-tuning is too technical, while the people who have the training data (product managers and domain experts) are often non-technical. With Promptrepo, they can now:
- Add training examples in Google Sheets
- Click a button to train
- Deploy and test instantly
- Use OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or Llama models
We’ve used this internally for years to power AI workflows in our products (Formfacade, Formesign, Neartail), and we're now opening it up to others. Would love your feedback and happy to answer any questions!
---
Try it free - https://promptrepo.com/finetune
Demo video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1CTin1bD0w
Why we built it - https://guesswork.co/support/post/fine-tuning-is-the-future-...