Recently, a friend of mine who has no affiliation with IT whatsoever approached me with great excitement about an app he had developed overnight. He built the whole thing on his phone. I was baffled, though not surprised. These days, almost anything is possible — or at least, we like to think so.
This new reality makes technology accessible to almost everyone. All you need is an idea, a phone and a subscription for a month or so, and you're good to go, right?
Forgetting for a moment the 'crimes' that laypeople are committing regarding day-two operations (patching, security, etc.), the world is already flooded with apps. Everyone has their own business model, subscription process and requirements for signing up.
For consumers, this is becoming a nightmare.
Sharing your personal data with each and every one of them.
Paying everyone a subscription.
And so on.
I used to have lots of these apps and subscriptions one or two years ago.
Presentation AI
AI chatbots (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.).
Canva
AI video and image generators (Runway, etc.).
Freepik
And many more.
And that’s just for AI!
I have started to cancel a lot of subscriptions, including ChatGPT and Claude. I have started switching to platforms that aggregate all of these solutions in one place, with one account and one subscription — and that’s it!
This has shown me that I don't actually need to pay for a monthly or yearly subscription just to generate ads (like AdCreative) or flyers (like Canva). I do a lot, but I don't need a permanent subscription for that.
How Aggregation Platforms Work
Aggregation platforms such as Poe and Apify — and, I believe, ChatGPT in the future — bring together all the services and apps available. Think of it as a 'pay once, use all' model, with the amount depending on the subscription plan.
This is different from Amazon, where you just have a directory and pay each one individually (this is what we have now).
Apify is one amazing platform that has proven how powerful this business model is.
When you subscribe to Apify, you get access to around 5,000 "actors", most of which have flexible pricing options, such as paying per output result or even per call.
For example, I pay $50 per month and can use:
LinkedIn actors to scrape LinkedIn;
Reddit actors to scrape Reddit.
data analytics actors, such as Semrush, for in-depth analysis.
and many more
With pay-per-use, I don't have to pay for the Reddit API or a Semrush subscription. You get my point.
The Future of Aggregation
Now, think of this same concept with ChatGPT Store. We could have these giant platforms hosting thousands of AI services for everything:
Creative writing
Generating presentations
Generating images
Or even entire videos or books.
And all on a pay-per-use basis. This is technically already possible but still at a very early stage.
The Caveat
One could think of monopoly platforms such as Amazon, and of course, serious concerns arise with regard to control, power and security. However, we must also consider:
How much power do they exert?
How do they monetise developers?
The policy: what does and doesn't match their strategy.
A single point of failure.
In an ideal world, there would be multiple platforms that aggregate services, eliminating the need for multiple registrations and payments, and saving time and money on testing things that we rarely use — and even worse, things that don’t fulfil their promises, which we often only realise after paying a hefty subscription.
Top comments (0)