Arno Barton

Happy bday 😍😍😍

@OInnocxnt @gabriel1 The UX moat is dying, people are using Anthropic to build free versions of wrappers.

@arno_barton @gabriel1 Do you genuinely think Anthropic can create a product for all the million “wrappers”?

stripe and salesforce are just reselling AWS services

@kobyjconrad Plus a prompt teaser

@kobyjconrad People need to realise companies like Granola are literally a thin stack wrappers any company can integrate and build internally in 1-2 days If you are a startup, don’t pay for this. Here is a tiny mockup of the API connections and data needed.

This is harsh but Granola should probably fire their entire product team There are custom desktop icons, but I can't share a conversation with my AI Agent ngmi

@heynavtoor This is the start of a new open source revolution. AI was not meant to be resold to us as wrappers. “Good UI sells tokens.” Fine. Now that people are becoming aware of these moats and public data behind companies, that UI will be open sourced.

DocuSign Personal: $10 to $15 per month. DocuSign Standard: $25 to $45 per user per month. DocuSign Business Pro: $40 to $65 per user per month. A 10-person team on Business Pro pays $4,800 to $7,800 a year. To put signatures on PDFs. A team of 50 pays $24,000 to $39,000 a year. And there is a 100-envelopes-per-year cap on most plans. Send more contracts and you pay extra. Need SMS delivery? $0.40 per send. Need ID verification? $2.50 per attempt. Need premium support? $5,000 to $50,000 per year add-on. You are rationing digital signatures in 2026. DocuSign is a $10 billion company built entirely on this pricing model. Now meet DocuSeal. A free and open source alternative to DocuSign. Created in 2023 by a Ruby developer named Alex who was simply trying to sign one document and realised every solution online was overpriced or required a subscription. Three weeks later he had a working alternative. He pushed it to GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license. Today it has 11,800+ stars and over 1,000 forks. Bootstrapped. No VCs. No paywalls. Here is what DocuSeal does: - Upload any PDF and turn it into a fillable, signable form - Drag and drop signature fields, dates, checkboxes, file uploads, and 13 field types - Send to multiple signers with custom signing order - Automated email reminders - Mobile signing on any device - PDF signature verification built in - Audit trail for every document - Bulk send and templates - Full API access - Self-host with one Docker command Here is what DocuSeal costs: Zero. Forever. Unlimited documents. Unlimited signers. Unlimited storage. DocuSign limits envelopes. DocuSeal doesn't. DocuSign charges per SMS. DocuSeal doesn't. DocuSign charges for ID checks. DocuSeal doesn't. DocuSign sees your contracts on their servers. DocuSeal doesn't. Here is the wildest part: The median DocuSign contract per Vendr is $17,250 per year. One Reddit thread has people saying "they want me to pay $4.80 per e-signature." Self-host DocuSeal on a $5 cloud server and a 50-person team can sign as many contracts as they want without paying a single dollar. Your contracts never leave your server. Your client lists. Your NDAs. Your employment agreements. None of it touches a third-party company. For individuals who only sign a few contracts a year, you save $180. For small teams of 10, you save up to $7,800 a year. For a 50-person company, you save up to $39,000 a year. Your documents. Your signatures. Your server. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

You wouldn’t believe how many multimillion dollar wrappers you pay for are built on public data. Start building internally…

@gabriel1 This may be true, but wrappers are wrappers. Once open-sourced(which most will be eventually), the right interfaces won’t need to be paid for.

people talk with such confidence about wrappers dying as if model intelligence is all that matters, when the largest blocker to people using more tokens is finding the right interfaces

I have been making a free and open source project built to index and expose the public data and API calls behind the AI wrappers you and other companies pay for. The site gives you basic agentic structure and prompts for each company as-well btw I can’t wait to see what people manage to replicate now that the resources are getting shoved in their faces.

@willchen500 just went viral by making a free and open source version of an 11 BILLION dollar legal software in just 2 weeks. There are hundreds more funded companies built on public data, and you are just a few Claude prompts away from creating the next viral alternative…

Favourite Reddit quote of the day “The AI startup strategy right now is essentially 'choose a profession full of tech-illiterate Luddites, make an LLM wrapper, and market it to them like it has AGI capabilities.'” Harvey, Glean, Clay, Decagon, etc. have earned billions in valuation with this exact method.

Most people are shocked that the most highly valued legal startup in history does not even come default with a legal research function. It just has “deep research” which is just web search that gives you citations from SERP API results.

Harvey is valued at $11B. Legora just raised at $5.5B. I built their entire web application in two weeks and I'm making it open-source and free for everyone to use. Say hi to Mike: mikeoss.com. When I got the chance to try Harvey and Legora, I was surprised by how simple they were. A thought came to mind: I could probably build something similar in no time at all with Claude. And so I did. Assistant, project, tabular review and workflows. You get it all without vendor lock-in. Mike offers law firms an alternative, where they own the application layer and aren't stuck with a vendor they're renewing forever. You can try Mike in the demo on the website, or go to the GitHub link on the site to download the code and run a local version yourself.

@willchen500 Plus they already pay for the Westlaw, lexisnexis and other legal databases… Then they pay for them again just repackaged in a chatbot🙄

@arno_barton Harvey and Legora have a moat because so many older partners don’t even understand that they’re just a wrapper around a model. It’s really the best market to salesmaxx with a thin wrapper. But slowly people are starting to understand.

@aravpatel_ @willchen500 You can see all of Harvey’s and other wrappers backend public databases on an open source project I built called unwrapped.site, they literally operate off a lack of AI literacy within businesses…

@willchen500 I have not used harvey or legora, but I refuse to believe it is this simple. There have to be more layers of complexity to them

Amazing to see how well you have done building with the classic “wrapper” stack: Public data + llm calls = multimillion dollar valuation Will be interesting to see what happens to these companies once this classic setup becomes more widely known… Graphic from → unwrapped.site

Dropping Thursday: @meetgranola's Growth Playbook

@robiot It’s crazy that this classic wrapper stack: public data + llm calls + fancy ui = 1.8B. Great job on the marketing execution, but I can’t wait to see these companies crumble once the grift is common knowledge

you can now buy domains directly on Lovable to celebrate we’re letting you grab a domain for $1 for a limited time. Get one now before it's too late! been insanely fun building this with the team & so excited to finally share it

@icanvardar Lovable got valued at $1.8B. This company uses a classic wrapper stack Public data + llm api calls = billions in funding. Wait for these grifts to crumble once ai education is more mainstream. unwrapped.site/companies/lova…

$400M ARR for this ai slop ad?

@paulg Most of the most hype companies are already eaten. Public data + API calls = multimillions in funding These Saas grifts will crumble as soon as business owners learn how to use agents, no question.

Worrying that your startup will be eaten by the model companies is like worrying that your life will be constrained after you become a movie star. You're far more likely simply to fail.