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Show HN: Create your own finetuned AI model using Google Sheets

by QueensGambit on 4/30/25, 3:53 PM with 41 comments

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-...

  • by Centigonal on 4/30/25, 5:53 PM

    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.

  • by rgbrgb on 4/30/25, 5:48 PM

    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!

  • by ygreif on 5/1/25, 2:51 AM

    I love integrating into spreadsheets. Super easy to use. Reminds me a bit of mailmerge.

    I don't have much experience with modern finetuning, but isn't it highly technical. How many layers do you want to change? What is the learning rate? Does that need to be visible to the user? How many examples are needed in practice

  • by ipaddr on 4/30/25, 8:24 PM

    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.

  • by scosman on 4/30/25, 8:09 PM

    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.

  • by heresjohnny on 4/30/25, 7:51 PM

    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!

  • by raylad on 5/1/25, 7:16 AM

    Who is your target customer?

    From reading the site, it's not clear that someone who doesn't already know about fine tuning and want to do it would know what your service does or why they would need it.

    Recommendation: describe the process, and give some examples of applications.

  • by nbbaier on 4/30/25, 5:36 PM

    Heads up I get "ERR_CONNECTION_RESET" when navigating to https://promptrepo.com/finetune

  • by ricktdotorg on 5/1/25, 1:20 AM

    this is great, and right up my alley. i built a customer support chatbot using a google sheet for our CS folks to input & structure their question/answer pairs. that is auto xformed into markdown and fed into the bot for context. it works fairly well considering how simple it was to do. i'm really intrigued as to what promptrepo can add to that. will definitely give it some R&D time!

  • by ivape on 4/30/25, 6:36 PM

    This is awesome, I don't have a fine-tuning use case yet, but I can't imagine something being easier than a spreadsheet.

  • by sneha_tamal on 5/1/25, 7:25 PM

    How do you make sure the fine-tuning process stays effective without the risk of overfitting on specific data?

  • by littlestymaar on 4/30/25, 8:53 PM

    Why Google Sheet though? Why would you want your customers to give their training data to Google?!

  • by justanotheratom on 4/30/25, 6:11 PM

    FineTuning Ops platform requirement - compare evals, latency, cost across models.

  • by gitroom on 4/30/25, 10:53 PM

    honestly i like seeing tools get simpler like this, makes me wonder though how much of the real value comes from the tech itself vs just making everything less scary for folks who aren't engineers. you think easy interfaces actually help people get better results or just get more folks trying stuff?

  • by labrador on 4/30/25, 7:46 PM

    How is this different than OpenAI projects?

  • by mogili on 4/30/25, 7:05 PM

    Essentially this is a frontend to automate the process of converting a csv file into jsonl and pass through a fine-tuning service.