The irony is that a lot of the KYC checks are actually done in India: Jumio, Onfido, LexisNexis, Refinitiv, HyperVerge, IDfy, Signzy (a lot of major banks)
Unethical ? "they want to issue a wire transfer, but I don't feel comfortable giving my IBAN"
If the IBAM is the concern you can create a separate IBAN with Wise / Revolut for example quite easily (and for free, and for sure cheaper than refusing the money).
Few years ago, we had Google Bard, the ancestor of Gemini, which was supposed to be an AI LLM, and when you right-clicked the page, it was a fake page with hardcoded sentences in a .js file...
Im not sure what you consider successful. They've been struggling to get market share vs azure, and the product isnt that good. lots of rough edges, and piss poor support
Their API business model seems to be hope enough people accidentally go over free tier: $0 for the first 5000 monthly places lookups, $40 per 1000 after that
I guess it depends on your spending. GPT-5.2 and -5.3-Codex are certainly much cheaper: you get much more from the same $20 sub. When I was using Claude as primary I would daily hit limits and have to wait vs on GPT with more usage it only happened to me once in a few months when I was vibecoding non-stop for a week or two to port my personal Windows tools to Linux with multiple other projects being worked on in parallel.
Anecdotally GPT was also smarter than Claude which prompted my move from Claude in the first place: Gemini and Claude back in October failed to get their own harness PID.
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