didn't the underlying API they built upon ramp up their pricing and effectively price them out?

like a precursor to reddit's own API pricing changes that made it hard for 3rd party clients to compete.

The saving grace with these API wrappers is that local models being a thing can still let them hedge against the underlying AI labs eating up their stack.

The fate of Twitterrific and Apollo for Reddit come to mind.

Most of the clients were pretty bland and bad, made by Apple fanboys who believed that form was more important than function.

Tweetdeck came out as the leader over the rest (mainly due to having actual functionality), and about a year after it was the clear victor (2011) twitter acquired them, and slowly integrated them into twitter properly (though they killed a bunch of features along the way intentionally).

Fast forward to the musk takeover, and twitter's API pricing changed such that making a third-party client is infeasible.

I think a lot of the same is likely to apply here.

It's a winner-takes-all market, there's a bunch of people iterating on form and ignoring function, and the winner will be based more on function than form.

If there's a clear winner on function, one of the AI companies can acquire and integrate it.