🎯 if you build a site in ChatGPT, you may like it. Then it depends on what you want to do with it… next steps are where Big Tech upsells you on something like Netlify or paying their monthly subscription fee to deploy.
If you want a simple URL for your project that deploys instantly without going through namecheap etc., Shakespeare is perfect.
If you want to purchase a vanity URL through namecheap etc., it’s also perfect because you own it, we don’t. You own your code. Just get your domain registered and set up and you’re on your way.
We think Shakespeare is fun and useful enough that you’ll keep coming back to it to build your websites and apps. We don’t want to lock you in, upsell you, then rugpull you months later to lock you in even more and squeeze more money out of you.
Whenever the choice falls between “make money” and “create more user freedom,” @Alex Gleason always hits the MORE FREEDOM button. 🫡
Shakespeare is a UI that makes it easy to use any other AI provider (like z.ai or OpenAI) to build websites. You can connect directly to z.ai or OpenAI as a provider, and use their models directly.
In addition to the base services of these providers:
1. Shakespeare makes it easy to change on the fly between models and providers (ex. if you want to quickly switch out z.ai for GPT for a different task). This is also nice if you want the option to pay with Lightning, in which case you can use the Shakespeare AI provider or Routstr.
2. Shakespeare has a full development environment in it, including the ability to live preview sites and deploy to a working URL. If you are building in ChatGPT, you will need to download those files and run a local server to see the results. Most people don't know how to do this.
3. Shakespeare connects to git for version control (so you can revert changes). If you tell Chat GPT to make an edit to your website and you hate it, you will have a hard time getting back to the earlier version without git.
4. Shakespeare can clone entire open source projects just from a git URL and allow you to edit them directly in the web browser (chat can't do this)
5. Shakespeare is Nostr Native, and has custom-made tools it can call to ensure that it builds Nostr apps that work. Raw AI without these tools struggles to do this because it doesn't have enough training data on Nostr apps that work.
The easiest way to see all of this is to try it! Ask them both: "Build me a site like Twitter on Nostr"
Here is the result of that exact one prompt on ChatGPT :
https://chatgpt.com/share/68eecb0c-e7e0-8001-9bc9-c774368ed92e
(Spoiler: I tried downloading and running that zip folder, and it doesn't even install properly)
And the same one-shot prompt on Shakespeare (via shakespeare/claude-sonnet-4.5) with no additional edits:
https://nostr-chirp.shakespeare.wtf/
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