Discontinued
Popular enough to build, expensive enough to keep running.
Panera Launched an Unlimited Self-Serve Drinks Subscription in 2022 Alongside a Lemonade With Up to 390 Milligrams of Caffeine. The Only Limit at the Fountain Was One Cup Every Two Hours.
On 19 April 2022, Panera Bread launched Unlimited Sip Club, which it billed as the first nationwide unlimited subscription for self-serve beverages. For $10.99 a month, members could take one self-serve drink every two hours during café hours, refills included. The menu covered coffee, tea, fountain soda,
Spotify Sold a $90 Dashboard Player, Discontinued It Five Months Later, and Said It Would Keep Supporting the Ones People Owned. In December 2024 It Switched Every One of Them Off.
Spotify released Car Thing in February 2022. It was a small screen that mounted on a dashboard and controlled Spotify, aimed at drivers whose cars were too old to have an infotainment system. It cost about ninety dollars, and it required an active Spotify Premium subscription to do anything at
Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.
On January 13, 2023, Twitter's API went dark for third-party client apps with no announcement and no explanation. Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Fenix, and others simply stopped working, all at once, for everyone. Developers spent days guessing whether it was a bug, an outage, or deliberate. Four days later,
Reddit's API Was Free for 15 Years. Then It Would Have Cost One Developer $20 Million.
Reddit's API had been effectively free since 2008, which is how an entire ecosystem of third-party apps — some of them better than Reddit's own official app — got built on top of it for free, for fifteen years. In April 2023, Reddit announced it would start
Build-A-Bear's 'Pay Your Age' Day Got So Popular It Had to Be Shut Down Before Lunch
A discount so fair it worked on every age group at once — which is exactly why the stores couldn't handle it.
Blockbuster's 'No Late Fees' Promise (2005)
The ads said no late fees. The fine print said Blockbuster would just charge your card for the whole movie instead.