Ep 61: Subscription Overload—How New AI Lets Designers Consolidate
Subscription Overload: How New AI Lets Designers Consolidate
The AI app gold rush is winding down. Here is what happened, why most of those tools were never built for you, and how designers can finally stop renting fragmented software and start owning their workflows.
- Most AI design apps were not built for designers. They were built for the masses — low-hanging fruit from developers who saw a market and had no understanding of professional design process.
- The AI app gold rush is winding down. Apps that were just wrappers around ChatGPT or Gemini are disappearing because the foundation models themselves now do the same thing cheaper and better.
- Designers can now build their own apps. Vibe coding — chatting with an AI to build a functional tool — is accessible enough that you do not need a developer to create a workflow that fits how you actually work.
- Never pay for an annual subscription on a niche AI tool. The landscape changes too fast. Stick to monthly on anything that is not a core foundation model like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude.
- The industry is consolidating into fewer, stronger platforms. Acquisitions like Perplexity buying Visual Electric point toward a future of integrated systems — which is better for designers tired of fragmented subscriptions.
The Short Answer
The flood of AI design apps that hit the market over the past two years is receding. Most of them were not built for professional designers — they were built for anyone who wanted to DIY their house, by developers who had no idea what professional design actually involves. The ones that are disappearing deserved to. And the shift that is happening now — toward fewer, stronger platforms and designer-built custom tools — is genuinely good news for your workflow and your subscription budget.
How AI Apps Are Actually Built — and Why That Matters
Most designers do not realize this: the AI apps they have been paying for did not build their own AI. They took someone else's AI — OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic — and wrapped an interface around it. Think of it like a retailer. The foundation models are the wholesale supplier. The app is the store. You pay retail prices for something the store is sourcing wholesale.
That structure is fine when the wrapper adds genuine value — training the model on something specific, connecting multiple AI tools together, or solving a workflow problem that a raw chat interface cannot solve efficiently. The problem is that most design apps did not do that. They just put a slightly friendlier interface on top of a model that already existed and charged $50 a month for it.
"Why do I need to pay you $50 when I can do this for $20 and so much more internally? These apps are starting to pull back — and the ones that are surviving are the ones that actually do something the raw AI model cannot."
— Jenna GaidusekThe way Jenna explains it: the good apps are like a room designed by a professional. They took the individual wholesale components — image generation here, text processing there, research capability over there — and assembled them into something coherent that serves a specific purpose better than any individual piece could. The bad apps just took one wholesale component and resold it at a markup with a nice logo.
Where Apps Are Ending Up: Gone, Acquired, or Surviving
The market is sorting itself into three buckets right now — and the category an app lands in tells you a lot about whether it was ever genuinely useful.
Jenna also noted that apps built by husband-and-wife teams — where one partner is a designer and the other is a developer with a direct line to the actual workflow — consistently outperform those built by outside developers guessing at what designers need. MyDoma is one example she points to. That constant feedback loop between the designer and the builder is what produces tools that actually fit.
The Acquisition Wave: What Perplexity Buying Visual Electric Actually Means
The week before recording this episode, Jenna received an email that Visual Electric — one of her longtime favorite image creation tools for interior designers — had been acquired by Perplexity.
Her reaction: genuinely excited. Not because of what it means for Perplexity's business, but because of what it fills in. Perplexity has always been Jenna's preferred research browser — an aggregator of multiple AI models that surfaces the best response to any query rather than being locked to one model. Its weakness was visual output. Visual Electric's strength was exactly that: generating multiple image options at once, across multiple models, with finer control than what ChatGPT or Gemini offered natively.
This kind of acquisition is the consolidation signal the market has been pointing toward. Fewer, stronger platforms that do more things well — rather than dozens of single-purpose tools you have to stitch together yourself. That is genuinely good news for designers who are tired of managing ten subscriptions to cover one workflow.
Jenna also flagged a broader pattern she has been watching: the major AI companies opened their technology to developers, encouraged them to build apps on top of it, and then — predictably — either replicated the functionality themselves in a major update or acquired the apps that added real value. For the apps that were just wrappers, this was an extinction event. For the apps that built something genuinely different, it was an acquisition opportunity.
Building Your Own Apps: What Is Actually Possible Now
This is the part Jenna has been building toward all summer. She has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years paying developers to build software — including the rendering and e-design platform that was acquired by MyDoma Studio in 2022. That same type of functionality, she says, can now be built in a day for about $20 using AI-powered app builders.
The approach is called vibe coding — essentially chatting with an AI to describe what you want the app to do and having it write the code. Jenna does not have a computer science background. She has tested dozens of platforms over the summer, including Base 44, Bolt, and building directly inside Gemini.
Her current recommendation after all that testing: building inside Gemini gives the most focused, reliable output for design-specific tools. The trade-off is that it lacks the built-in backend infrastructure — databases, login systems, persistent storage — that platforms like Base 44 provide. For internal team tools or simple workflows, Gemini is enough. For anything that needs secure user accounts or stored data, a more complete platform is worth the setup.
The bigger picture Jenna is building toward is an AI App Studio for interior designers — tools built by designers for designers, maintained and updated as the technology evolves, and shared inside the community rather than sold back to the industry at SaaS prices. That is already in progress and releasing in the certificate program.
Your Subscription Audit: What to Keep, What to Cancel
Jenna spent two months trying to cancel apps she had been paying for. Half of them were hard to cancel. The lesson: be deliberate before you start, not after. Here is the framework she is now using.
- Core foundation models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity) — keep these. They are the wholesale layer everything else runs on. Annual subscriptions are reasonable here.
- Niche AI apps — monthly only, never annual. The landscape changes too fast. You do not know if the app will exist in a year or if a foundation model will replicate its core feature in the next major update.
- Apps built by designer-developer teams that do something the raw AI cannot — worth evaluating carefully. These are the ones with staying power.
- Apps you use less than 20% of — cancel and replace with a custom-built workflow or a foundation model prompt that does the same job.
- Apps that are just wrappers with preset style options like "boho," "Scandinavian," "mid-century modern" — cancel immediately. A professional interior designer has no use for that.
Jenna is the go-to educator for design professionals who want to use technology without losing their creative edge. A designer turned tech advocate, she's a nationally recognized speaker, podcast host, community builder, and custom app builder based in Charleston, SC.
Her mission: make AI accessible, practical, and ethical for every interior designer — from solopreneurs to established firms.
Disclaimer: This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording then edited by the author for accuracy and details.