Api-economics Memes

So apparently the genius business model of "build a free API and pray developers use it" is finally dying. Who would've thought that letting devs integrate your service for free wouldn't pay the bills? Now these providers want actual money upfront, and suddenly every "revolutionary" startup that's just a fancy wrapper around someone else's API is sweating bullets. The panic is real because half these companies literally just vibe-coded a UI on top of OpenAI or some other service. Their entire tech stack is held together with API keys and venture capital. Now they're looking at their burn rate like "wait, we have to actually BUILD something?" The funniest part? These startups raised millions by convincing investors they're "AI-powered" when really they're just really good at reading documentation and making fetch requests look pretty.