A ChatGPT demo so minimal it recommends the upgrade

What it does chatgpt-demo is a bare-bones web frontend for the OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo API. It lets you host your own minimal ChatGPT interface without building a UI from scratch. Most of the README is devoted to deployment, with one-click templates for Vercel and Netlify, plus a Docker image and Sealos instructions.

The interesting bit The authors are refreshingly honest: they openly steer users toward their newer project, Anse, for multi-chat, image generation, or anything beyond a single conversation. That makes this repo less a product and more a disposable scaffold—useful precisely because it doesn’t try to be a platform.

Key highlights

• One-click deploy buttons for Vercel and Netlify; Docker image published to Docker Hub
• Environment-driven configuration for API keys, custom base URLs, HTTPS proxies, and site passwords
• Defaults to gpt-3.5-turbo but supports swapping models via OPENAI_API_MODEL
• Built with Astro (per repo topics), though the README never explains why
• Includes an automatic upstream sync workflow for forked repos

Caveats

• The live demo is currently offline because the maintainers’ API key limit is exhausted
• The authors explicitly recommend using Anse for multi-chat, image generation, or “more powerful features”
• Requires Node 18 or later; the FAQ notes fetch and stream errors on older versions

Verdict Grab this if you need a private, single-conversation ChatGPT UI running yesterday. Skip it if you want features—the maintainers already wrote the replacement.