Merlin

Updating my review, which was previously 3 stars.

After using Merlin for a while, it is clear this is and will be a great product.

1. The team is VERY responsive. They have a Canny feedback page and Discord channel where they are active multiple times per day. They are also very responsive over e-mail. Any new ideas or bugs get talked about.

2. They want to make Merlin genuinely really good. You can just tell by how engaged they are, and how they make changes based on feedback.

3. Although the Tier 3 deal was really good and gave a lot of credits, the team were away they would likely have financial issues if they went with "unlimited" like many companies do, or did not offer an upgrade path. Merlin offered a fair upgrade path for AppSumo users.

4. The UI has changed and is MUCH better than it was before. There are still some steps to take to improve further, and the pop-out extension needs modernising like the main UI, but the main, web-accessed UI is much better than it was before.

5. Being able to use multiple chatbots in one place can be really useful. Being able to create images or text output is really useful.

6. They add the most up-to-date AI models very quickly. GPT o1 and Flux 1 Pro were added pretty much on their release days. These are expensive models we are getting included in our plan.

Mostly, the updated review is because the teams is clearly interested in not only making this a great product, but making it sustainable. Given the number of products that shut down, this ahs given me faith in the Merlin team.