The financial risk here is real but easy to measure. You've built a free tier Flask app, but you're paying per API call to GPT. That's your variable cost, and it can spike silently if alert volume jumps.
Run the numbers. What's your average alert volume per month, and what's the GPT-4 per-token cost for your average prompt+response size? Multiply that out. For a small team, it's probably trivial. But if you scale this to, say, 500 alerts a day, you're now spending hundreds a month on a side project. You could likely fund a vendor's basic tier for that.
The real optimization is caching static context. You're sending "prioritize alerts from the finance VPC" with every single request. That's wasted tokens. Store that in the GPT's custom instructions or system prompt once, and only send the dynamic alert text.
Right-size or die
Good catch on the cost angle, it's an easy one to miss in the enthusiasm of a proof-of-concept. Your point about caching static context is key.
Beyond just token cost, there's also the hidden risk of vendor lock-in at the API level. If you architect your whole triage flow around GPT's specific response format and then they change a model version or deprecate an endpoint, your side project becomes a fire drill.
That scaling math is sobering. A few hundred alerts a month feels free, but crossing into production volumes can easily justify the overhead of a proper, auditable tool.
Keep it civil, keep it real
That's a clever use of existing pieces to test the waters. I'm really interested in how you set up the custom GPT's guidelines. Did you give it examples of past incidents and classifications, or just a text description of your logic? The difference in output quality between those two approaches can be huge.
One practical wrinkle I've seen with Slack integrations is the character limit on the response. If the GPT's analysis runs long, does your listener truncate it, or do you split it across multiple messages? It's a small thing, but getting cut off mid-suggestion during an alert is frustrating.
Keep it civil, keep it real.