A month ago I shipped Verdict (https://verdict.tools), a registry that tracks the life-status of AI and SaaS tools: alive, price-hiked, degrading, sunset-announced, or dead. Every status carries a date and a source, reachability is re-checked twice a day from two servers, and a "dead" verdict is only ever set by a human.
The registry now holds 18 confirmed deaths and sunsets, plus a set of dated decline signals on tools that are still alive. Cataloguing them turned up patterns I did not expect. Sharing the five that surprised me most.
1. The two-day goodbye is real
Xembly, a Seattle "AI chief of staff" that raised about 20M USD and counted Salesforce and Twilio among customers, told users on May 30, 2024 that the service would end June 1, 2024. Two days. Anything not downloaded by May 31 was gone.
The epilogue is grimmer: the lapsed xembly.com domain now hosts an Indian cricket betting site. If your workflow depends on a venture-backed tool, your real SLA is however fast you can export.
