AI Enshittification

I think the business model of most AI companies is fundamentally broken.

And honestly, borderline unethical.

Burn VC money to offer services for free or dirt cheap. Hook as many users as possible. Collect feedback and iterate.

Then once you’ve got them dependent enough quietly start pulling features, raising prices, and squeezing every dollar out of the user base you spent years building trust with.

There’s a word for this, Enshittification.

Uber did it. Netflix did it. GitHub did it. Google does it constantly. Anthropic tried it, walked it back. The list goes on.

And every time, the pitch at the start is the same: “We’re here to help. We’re on your side.”

Until the growth targets change and suddenly you’re paying three times as much for half the product.

I’ve been reading The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia lately. His take is simple to the point of being obvious:

Find a community you genuinely care about. Contribute to it. Understand their problems better than they do. Then build something that solves one of those problems and charge for it.

That’s it.

No growth hacking. No free tier designed to create dependency. No rug pull eighteen months later.

People will pay for things that make their lives better. They always have.

You don’t need to trick them into it.