I haven't looked at it in over a year. I haven't bothered trying to ask a question in 10 years. They were killing themselves before AI by being openly hostile to people asking questions.
I'm normally not a fan of AI being shoved into products but I love it in PostHog. I can ask it a product question, ask it to slice and dice data, etc and it does a really good job of sifting through my events, doing analysis, building dashboards, etc. It's normally boring tedious work to do that stuff in PostHog so I'm impressed and glad it works.
If you're non-technical and just wanting to play around with UI, I highly suggest you explore Claude Design. It's programming under the hood to make prototypes, but the coding is 100% hidden away from you. It can help you explore design ideas pretty quickly.
FYI. Something is off about the data. It said there was one route and that scooter was 7 minutes faster than biking. E-bike was 16 minutes and scooter was 24 minutes.
Companies are happy to pay for SaaS products that are being run by a team of people who are experts in that domain and are also responsible for anything that goes wrong. Cloning something in house, no matter how it's done, doesn't bring you the subject matter experts and it shifts the responsibility/blame internally.
The $20/mo plan was almost enough for me coding daily. Once I added Claude Design, I'd easily spend $20-50/day in extra usage. Upgrading to the $100 Max plan, I never come anywhere near the limits.
I don't really like the model of scrapers paying small fees. I think it devalues things.
I make money when people use my website. I don't make money when AI scrapes my content and answers the question without the user coming to my website.
I'd need scrapers to pay me 5-6 figure payments to replace the revenue they'd be taking from me if my content was easily scraped. I doubt that's ever going to happen.
With the advent of buying online, from sites like Newegg, I felt like the local stores were much less exciting even back then. It was nice to be able to buy something same day but browsing Newegg and having broad selection was more fun for me.
Google killed my startup in a similar way many years ago. In my case, they turned quota on services I needed down to 0, refused to tell me why, and closed my appeal. I never figured out what went wrong.
I'll never again use a cloud service where I'm not big enough to get quality customer service, which rules out the big clouds. It's too much of a business risk.
What's your marketing look like? A bad product that gets put in front of a lot of people will gain more traction than a great product only a few people see.
A competitor with funding may simply be able to kickstart product awareness with lots of lost spend on advertising. Whereas a bootstrapped company will have a much more difficult time getting off the ground.
I haven't even looked at your idea because it doesn't impact my answer. Starting something is harder than having a good product. You also need marketing, growth, etc which I have no idea if you're capable of doing.
Zooming out a bit. How do you feel about the possibility of quitting your job, spending 1-2 years working on this, failing, and looking for another job? You'd lose income but also have a very interesting life experience. I'm doing something similar and I legitimately don't mind failing because I'm glad I get to have the experience regardless of whether the startup works or not.
I have a lost wallet with about 300 Bitcoin sitting in a landfill somewhere. I tried out Bitcoin really early on and mined those over a few weeks. But they were worthless back then and I was burning electricity for "nothing" so I stopped. This was before that 10k Bitcoin pizza purchase happened. I have some regrets lol.
Technology is very cool and certainly has value in improving our lives. That being said, I have realized that I'm generally happier the less time I spend looking at screens. I opt for paper maps when I can. I read physical books. I'm just bored with nothing to do when I stand in lines. I don't really want to tech-ify stuff that much anymore.
A random example. They now make bird feeders with cameras and AI detection to tell you what type of bird you're seeing. But it's so much more satisfying to sit outside watching the bird feeder and then flip through a book to identify the bird. It's slower and old fashioned but it's a calm, satisfying thing to do.