Most things turn to shit over time.

The canonical enshittification case: a feed that once showed your friends now serves ads, recommended posts, and AI content to an ageing, shrinking audience.

Fan wikis written by volunteers, wrapped in heavy ads, and big communities are leaving for independent hosts.

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

Connected bikes and classes behind a subscription, with a fee for used equipment, a price rise, and a shrinking member base.

Once the default Q&A layer for programmers; the community-built corpus now mostly feeds AI tools, and new questions have all but stopped.

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

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

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.

A nonprofit offering free lessons and practice for anyone, with no ads.

Paid, ad-free search funded by subscribers instead of advertisers—you are the customer, so the results are tuned for you.

A one-time-purchase iPad drawing app with no subscription, no ads, and a public pledge against generative AI.

Nonprofit digital library behind the Wayback Machine: free, ad-free, and run for preservation—under constant legal and financial pressure rather than profit pressure.