I think a few points worth making here:
- From what I can see many products are rapidly getting past "just prompt engineering the base API". So even though a lot of these things were/are primitive, I don't think it's necessarily a good bet that they will remain so. Though agree in principle - thin API wrappers will be out-competed both by cheaper thin wrappers, or products that are more sophisticated/better than thin wrappers.
- This is, oddly enough, a scenario that is way easier to navigate than the rest of the LLM industry. We know consumer apps, we know consumer apps that do relatively basic (or at least, well understood) things. Success/failure then is way less about technical prowess and more about classical factors like distribution, marketing, integrations, etc.
A good example here is the lasting success of paid email providers. Multiple vendors (MSFT, GOOG, etc.) make huge amounts of money hosting people's email, despite it being a mature product that, at the basic level, is pretty solved, and where the core product can be replicated fairly easily.
The presence of open source/commodity commercial offerings hasn't really driven the price of the service to the floor, though the commodity offerings do provide some pricing pressure.
Email is pretty difficult to reliably self-host though, and typically a PITA to manage. And you really don’t ever want to lose your email address or the associated data. Fewer people could say they properly secure, manage and administer a VPS on which they can host the email server they eventually setup, over say a 10yr period.
Most people I saw offer self-hosted emails for groups (student groups etc), it ended up a mess. Compare all that to say ollama, which makes self-hosting LLMs trivial, and they’re stateless.
So I’m not sure email is a good example of commodity not bringing price to the floor.