I run a registry that tracks 218 AI and SaaS tools. 18 are already dead or dying - here are the patterns

Sergei Arbo — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:45:06 +0000

A month ago I shipped Verdict (https://verdict.tools), a registry that tracks the life-status of AI and SaaS tools: alive, price-hiked, degrading, sunset-announced, or dead. Every status carries a date and a source, reachability is re-checked twice a day from two servers, and a "dead" verdict is only ever set by a human.

The registry now holds 18 confirmed deaths and sunsets, plus a set of dated decline signals on tools that are still alive. Cataloguing them turned up patterns I did not expect. Sharing the five that surprised me most.

1. The two-day goodbye is real

Xembly, a Seattle "AI chief of staff" that raised about 20M USD and counted Salesforce and Twilio among customers, told users on May 30, 2024 that the service would end June 1, 2024. Two days. Anything not downloaded by May 31 was gone.

The epilogue is grimmer: the lapsed xembly.com domain now hosts an Indian cricket betting site. If your workflow depends on a venture-backed tool, your real SLA is however fast you can export.

2. An acqui-hire is usually a death sentence for the product

The pattern repeats with minor variations:

Rephrase.ai -> Adobe (Nov 2023): signups closed, wind-down announced Feb 2024, site now fully offline
Play.ht -> Meta (Jul 2025): product shut down Dec 31, 2025
Papercup -> RWS (Jun 2026): RWS bought only the IP; the standalone product is gone
Clockwise -> Salesforce (2026): product unavailable since March 27, 2026

The press release always says "we're joining X to continue the mission." The product's mission ends anyway. When your vendor gets acqui-hired, start the migration that week.

3. The consumer app dies first; the API gets a stay of execution

OpenAI shut down the Sora app on April 26, 2026, but the Sora API keeps running until September 24, 2026. That five-month gap is the migration window for developers, and it is closing.

The same staging shows up elsewhere: user-facing surfaces are expensive to run and easy to kill; contracts and integrations buy the API extra months. If you build on APIs, the app's death is your early warning.

4. Deaths come in clusters

Last week alone: BitMEX (an 11-year-old exchange!) announced on July 23 it will close permanently on September 23, 2026, and BitMart followed on July 26 with trading ending August 26. Back in 2023 it was the newsletter wave: Revue, TinyLetter, Mad Mimi within months of each other.

When one notable player in a category folds, check the rest of the category. The forces (margins, regulation, platform shifts) rarely stop at one company.

5. "Best tools" listicles rot silently

This whole project started because listicles do not get updated. Half the "best AI tools 2024" articles still recommend products that no longer exist. A recommendation without a verification date is folklore.

That is the one design rule I care about most: every status on Verdict shows when it was last verified, and the checks run twice a day whether anyone is watching or not.

The data

The full dated census is here: https://verdict.tools/mortality - with migration guides for the dead tools and sourced signal pages for the shaky ones. There is also a free status API (https://verdict.tools/developers) and an RSS feed of status changes if you want the deaths as they land.

It is my own project and still early. If you have been burned by a tool dying on you, I would genuinely like to hear the story - and if you know a shutdown I have missed, tell me and I will verify and add it.

I built a "living registry" that tracks which AI tools are actually still alive

Sergei Arbo — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:00:28 +0000

Over the past year I kept hitting the same wall. You find a good AI or SaaS tool, you recommend it to your team or build it into your product, and a few months later it's gone: shut down, acqui-hired, tripled its price, or just quietly got worse. The "best AI tools" listicle you found it on was written once, never updated, half the links already dead.

There was no good place to answer a simple question: is this tool actually still alive and worth it right now?

So I built one. It's called Verdict: https://verdict.tools

What it does

Every tool gets a status backed by a date and a source, not vibes:
alive, price-hiked, degrading, sunset-announced, or dead. A status you can't verify is worthless, so every claim links to where it came from and when it was last checked.

The parts I actually care about (as a dev)

Reachability is re-checked twice a day, from two separate servers. I run the checkers on two different VPS boxes so a single network blip can't lie. Right now 211 of 218 tracked tools were re-verified in the last 24 hours, and the "verified" date you see is that real timestamp.

A "dead" verdict is only ever set by a human. This one matters. An automated check seeing a site return 503 for an hour does not mean the product died, so the automated checks only feed a review queue and a person makes the actual call. No tool gets a tombstone from a flaky ping.

No visitor IPs are stored. Analytics are first-party and log no IPs at all.

It's built to be machine-readable and citable by AI answer engines: a public JSON status API, JSON-LD on every page, an RSS feed of status changes, an llms.txt, and embeddable status badges that auto-recolor if a tool's status changes (so a vendor can't slap a "verified alive" badge on a dead product).

The fun part: the Mortality Report

The piece I had the most fun with is a dated census of AI and SaaS tools that have actually shut down, with the patterns behind why. For the dead ones there are migration guides (what to do with your data, plus live alternatives), and for tools that are alive but showing dated warning signs there are "decline signal" pages.

It tracks a bit over 200 tools across AI writing, video, voice, meeting notes, sales outreach, marketing automation, and support, with a full Russian edition too.

It's early, and I'd love feedback

I just finished the build, so this is me putting it out there. If you've ever been burned by a tool disappearing on you: would you check something like this before picking one? What's missing? What should I add?

It's at https://verdict.tools. Tear it apart.

DEV Community: Sergei Arbo