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Sam Ragsdale
September 4, 2025
Thesis: As AI becomes a utility, the platform era gives way to a long tail of small, opinionated apps that do one job perfectly and monetize per use.
For twenty years, power pooled into walled gardens. Discovery centralized, spend centralized, and we were told only giants could monetize. That was true when advantage lived in proprietary data and bespoke infra.
But intelligence is turning into a utility. The AI models will keep improving and keep competing. That's great. Competition drives the core toward commodity. When the core commoditizes, profit moves to the edges: to the pixels that construct context, and to the settlement layer that turns usage into money.
“In a value chain, when one component becomes modular and commoditized, thus losing its profitability, attractive profits shift to an adjacent, interdependent component.”
— Clayton Christensen
This is the micro-app moment.
A micro-app doesn't pretend to be a platform. It picks a job: summarize that contract cleanly, rewrite this PR description like a human, turn my meeting into tasks I'll actually do. It lives where the work already happens: your browser, your chat, your documents. It charges when it delivers. No bundles, no bloat, just outcomes.
The next few years will be weird. The big AI labs will jockey for monopoly. Models will leapfrog. Prices will swing. Policies will change weekly. Regulation in flux. That chaos doesn't favor incumbents. It favors builders who are nimble. If you control the interface and own the user relationship, you can swap the engine at will and create immense value in a niche.
That's why we built Echo.
Echo is the business layer for the micro-app revolution: an AI routing service, an authentication SDK, and a merchant of record for LLM credits, all bundled into one. Drop in five lines and your app can authenticate users, route and meter AI calls, charge per call, and return your profit. You set the markup. Echo handles the money, taxes, receipts, and the messy parts of putting expensive AI resources in the hands of your users.
Let the models compete. Let distribution fragment. Let the best UX win.
ChatGPT wrapper is a VC slur born before it was clear that AI models were the commodities. Now it means a great interface combined with commodity intelligence. Ship the micro-app that does the job. Micro-apps aren't features of mega-apps. They're the next firms.
Echo turns inference into income to ensure micro-apps reshape the internet.