whatsum

The post-mortem

whatsum was born from a real pain: operators drowning in WhatsApp groups and DMs, needing to know what mattered without scrolling for an hour. We built AI daily digests that folded the noise down into one short brief you could read with your coffee.

It worked. It had a paying client who relied on that morning summary. The product did exactly what it promised — this was never a case of something that failed to ship or failed to help.

But the economics didn't hold. Summarizing chat traffic at scale meant processing a large volume of messages every single day, and the infrastructure cost of doing that outran what the product earned. There was also a standing question about WhatsApp's terms for this kind of automation. So we retired it, on purpose, while it still worked.

The lesson is the reason this page exists. A product that works is not the same as a product that pays. whatsum is our cleanest reminder that unit economics decide what lives — and that shutting something down honestly beats quietly propping it up.