What Happened to These AI Tools: Dead, Renamed, and Still Alive

Most AI tool round-ups are written once and never rechecked. The result is that products which no longer exist keep getting recommended, sometimes for years, by pages that still rank.

I keep finding these while writing other things. A voice generator list here recommended two tools that were gone. A presentation tool everyone still ranks has no website at all. So this page collects them in one place, with the date each was checked and the method used.

Every entry is something I verified myself rather than read somewhere. Where I could not verify something, I say so rather than filling the gap.

Tools with no working product

These three have no product you can go and use.

A note on what I am claiming with Tome. I am reporting what its domains do today, not announcing a shutdown on the company's behalf, because there was no notice for me to read. What I can tell you is that following a recommendation to Tome right now lands you on an error page.

Play.ht and LOVO are the clearer cases. One has a dead domain after an acquisition that took the team and not the product. The other has a liquidation filing with a case number you can look up.

Tools that changed name or owner

The product usually survives here. The name does not, which matters because the old name is what you are searching for.

Domains that moved without the product changing at all: chat.openai.com now goes to chatgpt.com, runwayml.com to runway.com, klingai.com to kling.ai, and notebooklm.google.com to notebook.google.com. Old links still work through the redirects, so nothing breaks. What a stale domain tells you is when the article pointing at it was last touched.

What happened to Windsurf, in full

This is the most searched question on this page, so it gets its own section.

Windsurf was the default answer to "what should I use instead of Cursor" for about two years. Cognition acquired the company and folded the product into its Devin line. The name stopped existing.

Both windsurf.com and codeium.com now redirect to devin.ai/desktop, and the page title there is Devin Desktop. That single redirect is the whole story, and it takes ten seconds to check.

The pricing moved with it. Most articles still say Windsurf Pro is $15 a month. Devin's own plans page lists Free, Pro at $20 and Max at $200, with Teams at $80 base plus $40 per developer. So if you were interested in Windsurf specifically because it undercut Cursor, that reason is gone. Both are $20 now.

The product did not get worse. It is still an AI-native editor competing for the same job, and Cognition positions Devin as the place you run coding agents, local or cloud, with Desktop as the local half. What changed is the company, the name, the price and the billing model.

One caveat I will state plainly: I could not re-verify the feature set after the rebrand, because devin.ai returns rate-limit errors to automated requests. The redirect and the plan prices I read directly. The capability details I did not, so check the current free quota yourself before committing to it.

What happened to Play.ht

The second most searched, and a cleaner story.

Meta acqui-hired PlayAI, the company behind Play.ht, in July 2025. Reporting put it at around 35 people moving into Meta's Superintelligence Labs division. The team went. The product did not go with them.

Play.ht shut down on December 31, 2025, and the domain no longer resolves. That is the end of it. There is no successor product to migrate to and no redirect pointing anywhere useful.

What makes this one worth its own section is how long it has outlived itself in search results. It still appears in AI voice generator round-ups published well into 2026, sometimes ranked and recommended with pricing attached. Anyone following those recommendations lands on nothing.

If you came here looking for a replacement, the voices in that category that were still operating when I last checked are ElevenLabs, Murf and Descript, plus self-hosted Chatterbox if you would rather not rent the capability at all.

Models that were retired

Model retirements catch people out because articles name a specific version and that version quietly stops existing.

Anthropic's and Google's naming moved on too. Anything still describing Claude 3, Sonnet 4 or Opus 4 as current, or Gemini 1.5 as a flagship, was written a while ago.

Free tiers that stopped being free

This is the quietest category, because nothing dies. The product carries on and the free option disappears, so an article recommending it stays technically about a real tool while being useless advice.

Runway is the one worth reading twice. Almost every list describes 125 credits as a free tier, which implies it recurs. Their own pricing page describes it as one-time. Converted into output it is roughly ten seconds of video, ever, which is a genuinely useful thing for deciding whether you like the tool and useless for making anything.

Things that are fine, despite what you may have read

Worth including, because a tracker that only reports deaths trains you to expect the worst.

Suno is alive and sells Free, Pro at $10 a month and Premier at $30, which fall to $8 and $24 if you pay for a year. This page previously quoted the annual rates as the monthly prices, which is the same mistake it warns other publishers about. There is no Basic tier, so any article pricing one is describing a plan that does not exist.

Chronicle is alive at chroniclehq.com. Be careful here: chronicle.com belongs to the higher education publication, an entirely different company. I nearly recorded the wrong one.

Genially is alive. It moved its pricing from a pricing path to a plans path, which breaks old links and tells you when an article was last checked.

Writer.com is alive, though its dedicated AI content detector page now redirects to an anchor on the homepage rather than a page of its own. That is usually what happens shortly before a feature stops being a priority, so treat it as a watch item rather than a death.

How I check

Nothing here is clever. It is just done rather than skipped.

Resolve the domain and follow the redirects. This one step catches most of it. A redirect to a different brand tells you about an acquisition. A failure to resolve tells you about a shutdown. Tome, Play.ht, Windsurf and Codeium were all caught this way.

Read the vendor's own pricing page, not a summary. Runway's one-time credit wording is on their page in plain sight, and almost every article reports it as a monthly tier anyway.

Check the repository if there is one. A project with no release in a year is not maintained, whatever its homepage says.

Say when you could not check. Several vendors block automated access, Canva and OpenAI's help pages among them. Where that happened I have marked entries as reported rather than verified instead of quietly filling the gap.

Why this keeps happening

Not malice, mostly. Checking whether a product still exists is slow, boring, and produces nothing to publish when the answer is yes.

Meanwhile an article from 2024 keeps ranking and keeps earning. Nobody has an incentive to recheck it, and the reader who follows a dead recommendation rarely comes back to complain. The pages that rank for these queries are frequently the least maintained ones, because ranking and freshness are not the same thing.

I have made this mistake myself. This site recommended Windsurf at $15 and pointed readers at codeium.com, and it stayed wrong until I checked. That correction is why this page exists.

Using this page

If you are choosing a tool, search it here first. If it is in the dead or renamed tables, you have saved yourself a wasted signup.

If you are writing about AI tools, resolve the domains before you publish. It takes minutes and it is the difference between a page that ages well and one that quietly becomes wrong.

For the wider pattern of what pricing did across the year, what AI pricing did in 2026 is the dated record. For the current free tiers in specific categories, free AI video generators, the best AI tool for PPT and best free AI image generators each carry the arithmetic rather than the marketing.

Sourcing

Every entry above was checked directly by resolving domains, reading vendor pricing pages, or in LOVO's case a court filing with a docket number. Dates in the Checked column are when I last confirmed that specific row, not when this page was published.

Entries without a specific date are ones where the change is well established and the exact verification date is older than my current records. Where a vendor blocks automated access, which includes Canva and OpenAI's help pages, I have not quoted figures I could not read.

This page is updated whenever a check on this site turns something up. If a row looks old, treat it as old.