Ask HN: How many of you are profiting with LLM wrapper apps?

This is a really, really good question! While I wouldn't necessarily call what I'm building "wrappers", although others might disagree, I'm not making any revenue from them currently, however my market is more developer tools & enterprise.

I AM however, getting lots of value from having built a lot of tools, but by virtue of hands on experience with the tech (I'm a SWE), and reputation as someone who's actively integrating the tech, not sure if that counts haha but it's helping my career at the moment!

I feel like nobody is making money from pure wrappers. Services like Cursor or Vapi are derogatorily called wrappers, but they do a lot of work on the harness. It's quite clear what work they do if you try to build your own.

Wrapper apps are basically dropshipping from back in the day. I am sure the real profit is in the right problems that users are willing to pay for. AI portraits for example is a very simple solution that is a wrapper with an image generator on top. Still pulling in big bucks every day.

I sprinkled some pixie dust and put a bow on mine and 5x'd my revenue. Turns out people love paying a lot of money for something they can do themselves. Now if only I can get my token costs under control...

0, wrappers are not defensible.