This weekend, a Medium article called "I Reverse-Engineered 200 AI Startups. 146 Are Selling You Repackaged ChatGPT and Claude with New UI" made it to the front page of Hacker News. The author found that out of 200 AI startups, "73% are running third-party APIs with extra steps." The author also found that at least one company was putting a 1000x markup on model API costs. We discuss at length: