The tools that died
Of 216 AI and SaaS tools we track, 13 have confirmed deaths since 2023 and 7 more are showing dated decline signals. Every entry below carries a date and a source. This is the graveyard, and the pattern in it.
The graveyard
| When | Tool | What happened | Source | Move to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 26, 2026 | Sora AI Video Generation | Shut down. | OpenAI Help Center | Runway |
| Mar 27, 2026 | Clockwise AI Meeting Notes & Scheduling | Shut down. | Clockwise (official shutdown notice) | Fellow |
| Mar 5, 2026 | Drift AI Customer Support | Sunset announced. | Salesloft newsroom | Intercom |
| Jan 28, 2026 | Unbounce Smart Copy AI Writing & SEO Content | Standalone AI copywriter (formerly Snazzy AI) discontinued. | Unbounce Documentation | Jasper |
| Dec 31, 2025 | Play.ht AI Voice & TTS | Shut down. | TechCrunch | ElevenLabs |
| Jun 30, 2025 | Replica Studios AI Voice & TTS | AI voice platform for games and film ceased operations. | MultiLingual | ElevenLabs |
| Dec 3, 2024 | DMM Bitcoin Crypto Exchanges | Shut down. | Decrypt | Coinbase |
| Aug 30, 2024 | Mad Mimi Marketing Automation with AI | Closed by GoDaddy, a decade after acquisition. | Mad Mimi (official notice) | Mailchimp |
| Mar 8, 2024 | Airgram AI Meeting Notes & Scheduling | Absorbed into Notta after acquisition. | Notta (official 'Airgram Has Joined Notta') | Notta |
| Feb 29, 2024 | TinyLetter Marketing Automation with AI | Retired by its owner, Mailchimp (Intuit). | Spam Resource | MailerLite |
| Jan 2024 | Coqui AI Voice & TTS | Text-to-speech startup wound down operations. | Hacker News (Coqui.ai Is Shutting Down) | ElevenLabs |
| Sep 21, 2023 | Truffle Suite Crypto-Adjacent Dev & Finance Tools | Sunset by Consensys; developers steered to Hardhat and Foundry. | Consensys official blog | - |
| Jan 18, 2023 | Revue Marketing Automation with AI | Shut down by Twitter, two years after it was acquired. | Engadget | MailerLite |
Each death is set by an editor, never by an automated check, and links to its source. Month-only dates are where the vendor announced without a precise day.
What the deaths have in common
The newsletter graveyard
Revue, TinyLetter and Mad Mimi: email tools all owned by big companies (Twitter, Mailchimp, GoDaddy). Acquisition was the beginning of the end, not a lifeline.
AI voice attrition
Coqui and Replica Studios both stopped within 18 months. Capital-heavy, fast-commoditizing, and squeezed by the frontier labs.
Acquisition as a death signal
Airgram folded into Notta; Forethought is being acquired by Zendesk now. When a small tool is bought, the standalone product often does not survive. Watch the acquisitions.
On the watchlist (still live, declining)
| When | Tool | Signal | The dated fact | Move to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 12, 2026 | Grain AI Meeting Notes & Scheduling | Price hike | Lowest listed monthly plan on the vendor pricing page is $19/mo, up from our recorded $15/mo (+27%). | Fireflies.ai |
| Mar 11, 2026 | Forethought AI Customer Support | Acquisition | Zendesk announced its intent to acquire Forethought, planning to fold the startup's technology into Zendesk's own AI products rather than continue it as a standalone company. | Intercom Fin |
| Dec 18, 2025 | Fireflies.ai AI Meeting Notes & Scheduling | Legal action (biometric privacy) | A putative class action (Cruz v. Fireflies.AI Corp., filed December 18, 2025 in Illinois federal court) alleges that Fireflies' speaker-recognition feature creates and stores meeting participants' voiceprints without consent, including people who never created an account, in violation of Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). | Granola |
| Oct 22, 2025 | Otter.ai AI Meeting Notes & Scheduling | Legal action (privacy) | Four putative class suits filed August-September 2025 were consolidated as In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation before Judge Eumi K. Lee; a motion-to-dismiss hearing was set for May 2026. | Fathom |
| Sep 2025 | Descript AI Video Generation | Legal / reviews | Reviewers reported unexpected bill increases and features such as Studio Sound, Overdub and Underlord being moved into metered AI-credit pools after the new billing model took effect. | - |
| Aug 8, 2025 | Salesloft AI Cold Outreach & Sales | Security incident (OAuth breach) | A threat actor (UNC6395) abused compromised OAuth tokens from Salesloft's Drift integration to steal data from more than 700 corporate Salesforce instances between August 8 and 18, 2025. Salesloft and Salesforce revoked all Drift tokens and pulled the app from AppExchange on August 20, 2025. | Outreach |
| Jul 10, 2025 | LOVO AI Voice & TTS | Legal action (voice rights) | A federal judge (SDNY, Judge Oetken) let voice actors' right-of-publicity claims under New York Civil Rights Law sections 50-51, plus state consumer-protection and breach-of-contract claims, proceed against LOVO in the putative class action Lehrman and Sage v. Lovo, while dismissing the federal trademark and most copyright claims. | ElevenLabs |
The radar's first live catch
Most of the deaths above were recorded after the fact, from public announcements. The interesting one is the newest row of the watchlist. Grain was not found by an editor reading the news: our pricing sensor read the vendor page, measured the increase against the last recorded price, and raised a signal. An editor approved the verdict, and the page published itself in two languages.
Get an alert the moment a tool's status changes
A price hike, a sunset announcement, or a confirmed shutdown, each dated and sourced. We email you when it happens, not before. No predictions, no spam.