💩 Enshit

Two-sided travel marketplace: guest fees, host policies, and algorithmic ranking shift surplus toward the platform as inventory professionalizes.

Dominant marketplace: Prime lock-in, ad load in search results, and third-party seller fees show clear tilt toward extraction.

Cloud primitives at scale: egress fees, service sprawl, and enterprise discounts make migration costly once you’re deep.

Microsoft’s search layer—often a conduit into Copilot, Edge defaults, and Windows integration rather than neutral retrieval.

OTA giant: aggressive merchandising, Genius loyalty nudges, and partner commissions typify scaled travel extraction.

Chromium fork pushing privacy and optional rewards—fewer trackers by default, but still a product with its own wallet, ads narrative, and ecosystem bets.

Differentiated dating brand with the same premium tiers, spotlight features, and engagement optimization as peers.

Square’s consumer wallet: still relatively simple, but Bitcoin, stocks, and borrowing expand the funnel toward fee-bearing products.

Flagship consumer LLM: free tier competes for attention; Plus, Team, and API convert habit into recurring revenue.

Anthropic’s assistant: Pro and Max plans monetize, but positioning still emphasizes capability and safety over ad models.

Strong real-time product for communities, but your social graph and server history are deeply embedded—switching means rebuilding social capital elsewhere.

Food delivery marketplace with fees stacked on restaurants and riders; convenience for diners, thin margins and policy fights everywhere else.

Privacy-marketed search with lighter tracking; still a business that must fund results and experiments over time.

Mature marketplace leaning on promoted listings, managed payments, and seller standards that favour scale over hobbyists.

Open-source Matrix client; messages federate across servers you control, end-to-end encryption is on by default, and no single company can revoke access to your conversations.

PC storefront and launcher competing on cuts and exclusives—better for devs in spots, still a platform tax and account wall for players.

Craft marketplace with rising fees, offsite ads, and pressure on sellers to absorb marketing and transaction costs.

Self-serve events and ticketing—easy for organizers until fees, feature tiers, and payout rules become the product.

Legacy OTA family: bundling, member pricing, and supplier terms tilt the stack toward the intermediary.

Wholesale marketplace connecting independent brands with independent retailers; net-60 payment terms and free returns lower the barrier for small shops, though take rates remain substantial.

Dating app for open-minded adults; subscription-only with no ads, no dopamine-engineered swipe loops, and identity features built around consent rather than engagement maximisation.

Collaborative design in the browser; files, libraries, and plugins embed teams so deeply that leaving feels like a migration project.

Open-source browser with privacy-forward defaults and no ad-tech parent; Mozilla’s funding model is fragile but the user-facing product still skews toward surplus over extraction.

Developer hosting platform built on open container standards with transparent usage-based pricing; VC-backed but designed to avoid the proprietary lock-in that defines AWS and Vercel's moats.

Open-source publishing platform run by a nonprofit foundation; self-hostable for free, Ghost Pro managed hosting funds the foundation without taking a cut of creator revenue.

Default forge for open source: Copilot, Actions minutes, and enterprise tiers monetize workflow lock-in.

Open-core DevOps platform: self-host option preserves some exit, SaaS still pushes seat-based upsell.

Free email with powerful search, paid behind Workspace; ads and AI features tie identity to Google’s broader stack.

Dominant Chromium default—fast and compatible, tightly coupled to Google accounts, sync, and the ads ecosystem that funds the web’s biggest funnel.

Google’s LLM family bundled with Workspace and Android: utility rises with account depth; free use feeds the broader ad and data stack.

Once best-in-class retrieval; now cluttered with SERP features, ads, and SEO sludge—users get the residual junk.

Niche network with Xtra/Unlimited paywalls, ad load, and privacy history that undermines user trust.

Designed-to-be-deleted marketing meets roses, boosts, and subscription gates—dating app economics in a nicer skin.

Outdoor accommodation marketplace for camping, glamping, and farm stays; host-aligned fee structure and a niche that resists the race-to-the-bottom commoditisation of hotel OTAs.

Expedia-owned OTA: rewards stamps and merchandising follow the same commission-and-upsell playbook as sister brands.

Apple ID–tied mail: works well inside the garden; storage tiers and device bundle pressure nudge paid iCloud+.

Canonical film/TV metadata within Amazon—indispensable lookups with ads, Prime nudges, and data leverage across commerce and streaming.

Indie game marketplace where creators set their own price and revenue split—including 0% to the platform; bootstrapped, no ads, and structurally hostile to extraction by design.

Tips and memberships with lighter branding than Patreon; Gold tier and shop features add platform dependency over time.

The default résumé graph for many industries, increasingly monetized via feed ads, recruiter tools, and upsells—users are the inventory.

Event management and ticketing platform popular with tech communities; free for organisers hosting free events, clean UX, no dark-pattern upsells—VC-backed but behavior is still user-aligned.

US rideshare duopoly player; take rates, incentives, and driver dynamics mirror Uber’s two-sided squeeze with regional variation.

Federated microblogging with no single owner; rough edges, but user surplus and exit to other instances is real.

Creator-owned streaming platform run by Standard Broadcast; subscription-only with no ads and a revenue share that returns the majority to creators—rare structural alignment at scale.

Still a capable player, but ad tiers, password-policy tightening, and recurring price moves shift value from subscribers toward ARPU and shareholders.

Flexible docs and databases users love; leaving means migrating templates, permissions, and team workflows—sticky by design.

Local-first note-taking app; files stay on your device in plain Markdown, sync and publish are optional paid add-ons, and the core product is free for personal use with no VC pressure.

Local LLM runner that lets you download and run open-weight models on your own hardware; no API calls, no usage billing, no data leaving your machine—VC-backed but FOSS by design.

Creator subscriptions with high take rate and policy whiplash; payment processors and brand risk shape who can stay on platform.

Consumer inbox on the Microsoft graph: Microsoft 365 upsells, Focused Inbox, and account convergence toward paid bundles.

Membership platform: take rates, discovery limits, and policy risk sit between creators and their audiences.

Incumbent digital wallet: fees, holds on seller funds, and upsells push value toward the network and away from edge users.

Answer-first search with citations; Pro tier and publisher deals raise questions about who gets traffic and margin.

End-to-end encrypted email from a Swiss nonprofit-aligned foundation; free tier with no ads or scanning, paid plans fund the service without monetising user data.

Mature platform shifting value toward advertisers, mods as unpaid labor, and product changes that prioritize engagement over quality.

Merchant platform still oriented toward independence, though app ecosystem, payments, and enterprise upsells add lock-in over time.

Still user-respecting by default, but growing reliance on the nonprofit’s roadmap and network effects builds soft lock-in.

Team chat that became the default layer for work comms; switching means migrating channels, bots, and ritualized workflows.

Default music app for many—great discovery and library UX; economics squeeze artists while pushing podcasts, ads, and tier upsells.

Default Q&A layer for programmers; community labor and SEO gravity built the corpus, while ownership and product choices steer monetization and AI reuse.

Dominant PC games client; strong library lock-in and social graph, still delivering real value to buyers.

Developer-first payments rails: pricing is real, but docs and APIs still deliver strong surplus to builders versus legacy processors.

Secondary ticket marketplace—liquidity and buyer protection on one side, fees and volatile pricing on the other.

Newsletter + payments with clearer creator cut than ad platforms; network features and video push toward fuller stack lock-in.

Fast clients and huge channels; optional E2EE and a semi-centralized model create a distinct trade-off between freedom and trust in the operator.

High fees, poor transparency, and market concentration leave fans with a worse experience than a competitive market would deliver—junk for end users.

Swipe economy: tiered subscriptions, boosts, and pay-to-play visibility monetize anxiety and asymmetry.

Two-sided marketplace that captures a large slice from riders and drivers; convenience for users exists, but the economic surplus flows to the platform and investors.

Social P2P app folded into PayPal: instant transfer fees, crypto and card upsells, and default public feed history (since reined in).

Frontend cloud with stellar DX: usage-based billing and framework coupling can still surprise teams at scale.

Default chat for much of the world; phone-number identity and network effects make leaving socially costly, while Meta monetizes the ecosystem around it.

A nonprofit reader mission with volunteer editors; ads are off by default and the core reading experience still prioritizes users over rent extraction.

International money transfer service built around mid-market exchange rates and transparent flat fees; publicly traded and profitable without resorting to hidden FX spreads.

API paywalls, algorithmic feeds, verification products, and ad load shift surplus toward the operator and advertisers—classic extraction on a still-central public square.

Console ecosystem with Game Pass value—great until subscriptions, store rules, and account lock-in define what “ownership” means.

Legacy free mail: heavy ads, pay-to-remove-ad tiers, and brand decay; still used as a durable address by many.

Unmatched library and creator economy, but ad load, Shorts push, and policy swings steadily tilt the experience toward Google’s revenue priorities.