Roboflow
Platform for labelling data, training and deploying computer vision models.
why this verdict
Keep paying — OpenAI has not replaced it
OpenAI's version overlaps, but does not finish the dev tools job, so this one still earns its $249/mo.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Multimodal frontier models handling vision tasks that used to need a trained custom model. OpenAI, June 10, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 2 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: Ultralytics and Hugging Face.
- What the call is worth $2,988/yr
- $249/mo at the entry paid tier — $2,988 a year per seat.
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- June 10, 2025
- List price
- $249/mo
- Per year
- $2,988
The backstory
Roboflow covers the whole computer vision pipeline, from annotating images to training a detector to deploying it on a camera at the edge. General multimodal models can now describe a scene without any training, which removes the easy cases. The cases that remain are the paying ones: counting parts on a production line at thirty frames per second on a device with no internet, where a frontier API is impossible on both latency and cost.
Escape hatches
YOLO models and training tooling, open source
ultralytics.com open_in_newData labelling platform aimed at enterprise teams
encord.com open_in_newPretrained vision models you can fine-tune yourself
huggingface.co open_in_new2 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.
