One Month
The GPT wrapper business has a shelf life, and it's almost up.
They died. Not in a month — more like a year — but the prediction was correct. By 2025, AI wrapper startups had 65%% churn in 90 days and VCs stopped returning calls. Jasper went from a billion-dollar valuation to a cautionary tale. The markup was the entire product, and the markup expired.
There is a whole category of startups right now that is, at its core, a GPT API call and a Pinecone index with a logo slapped on top and a pricing page that starts at $49 a month.
They will be dead in about a month.
Not because they're bad — some of them are fine — but because the markup is the entire product. The thing you're paying for is someone else having already figured out how to paste two API keys together, and that knowledge is expiring. Technical people can already do this themselves for near zero. The gap between "technical people" and "everyone else" on this particular task is collapsing fast.
When the no-code tools catch up — and they will, they always do, and they will do it in about four weeks if I had to bet — the pitch of "we did the integration so you don't have to" stops working. The integration stops being worth anything. The margin evaporates.
The businesses with one actual idea underneath them survive. The ones that are purely arbitraging the friction of API setup do not.
Thirty days. Maybe less.
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