Fritz.ai “sunsetting services”:
Fritz.ai is (was) a cool service for, in particular, making machine learning apps easily. The marketing hype was slick, and they roped in a lot of developers to help them push their service to many devs, particularly in the Android space, with paid articles on medium, and on their website.
First of all, I have to say, I take full responsibility for this, and I don’t blame anyone at Fritz.ai for my problems, it’s their service, they can do what they want – but I wasted a lot of time learning how to use their api, publishing my own (unpaid, no affiliation) posts about the service, and using it in apps published to the play store. Their business model seemed clear – free to use but once you reach a threshold you have to pay for the service. Seems legit, probably was legit.
My Android apps didn’t take off, so I never reached that threshold, never ended up paying for anything at all – but I did waste a lot of time making apps using a service which is getting switched off at the end of the month (August 2021). In other words, my apps are going to be switched off, for the (very) few users who did install them. If I want to continue with these apps, they will need a substantial re-write. In many ways I’m lucky that the apps were not successful!
So I have learned a valuable lesson here:
The lesson is: don’t trust your work to “flashy” or “new” products and services. I could have spent a week back then just learning the ins and outs of tensorflow on android, and done it myself. Just because I’m lazy doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Lesson learned.
*here is the full unedited email for those who are interested – I still don’t see any mention of this on their site or blog:
We’re Sunsetting Fritz AI
Service will end August 30, 2021
Hello,
This email is to let you know that we will be sunsetting the Fritz AI mobile machine learning platform, effective August 30, 2021.
What does this mean for my account?
As always, any custom trained models, datasets and annotations are exportable. Please see this documentation for how to export datasets and models.
After the sunsetting date, access to the Fritz AI SDK, webapp, API, and hosted services will be discontinued. All models, datasets, and resources stored in Fritz AI will be removed.
For mobile apps, the Fritz SDK will lose API connectivity, but on-device model inference should continue to function. Regardless, we advise you to update your apps, removing the Fritz SDK and models.
Snapchat lenses do not depend on the Fritz SDK nor API, and lenses should continue to function as before.
Why are we doing this?
Fritz AI’s mission has been to make the power of machine learning solutions available to mobile developers. When we started in 2017 there were few options available. In the following years there have been many great entries to the market such as ML Kit, Create ML, MediaPipe, Lobe.ai, MakeML, Firebase ML, and more. Now there is a mature ecosystem of tools, including free and open source options.
We understand that this decision will have significant consequences for our community, but we truly believe the wide range of incredible tools and resources out there will empower you to continue on without Fritz AI.
Sincerely,
Dan & Jameson
Founders, Fritz AI