Archive
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Money · Opinion
Treat every AI vendor that rents cheap compute as a credit risk in your contracts
The banks that wrote the AI data centre loans now want less of them.
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Markets · Opinion
If you sell on Amazon, Amazon already sets the price on your own website
Amazon's price-parity enforcement makes its fee stack the floor for every channel a seller uses.
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Money · Opinion
Write every AI contract as if your vendor files for Chapter 11 next year
Character.ai's filings show a well-funded AI company that could not cover its compute bill.
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Companies · Opinion
Codex CLI plants a self-updating server on laptops and procurement should refuse it
Since version 0.157.0, OpenAI's Codex CLI leaves a self-updating background daemon running.
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Markets · Opinion
New York just made the call-sales-to-cancel button a $3,500 liability
NYC's click-to-cancel rule reaches software seats sold to consumers.
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Work · Guide
Account-Based Outbound Agency 2026: How Eleven Agencies Pick Accounts
Eleven agencies read on how each picks the accounts it works, from each site's own wording, October 11, 2026.
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Work · Guide
Multichannel Outbound Agency 2026: Email, LinkedIn, Calls and Ads at Eleven Agencies
Eleven agencies checked on how many outbound channels each runs for the client, from each company's own pages, read October 11, 2026.
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Companies · Opinion
An open-source badge on your password manager guarantees your company nothing
Bitwarden's switch to commercially licensed app builds shows the open-source label protects nobody who pays.
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Companies · Opinion
Your venture-backed runtime has a six-month exit clause and you never signed it
Deno's move to Cloudflare handed paying Deploy customers a six-month notice period.
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Money · Opinion
OpenAI's missing $20 billion belongs in your next AI contract
If OpenAI's run rate was $20bn below what was signalled, enterprise buyers should treat AI roadmaps and price promises as investor marketing and write exit rights in now.
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Work · Opinion
Microsoft cut its engineers' AI budgets to $10,000 a month and your CFO is taking notes
Meta and Microsoft now police what each engineer spends on Claude.
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Money · Opinion
JetBrains' own books show the per-seat IDE deal is dying, so renegotiate now
JetBrains' Prague company grew revenue and watched gross margin collapse while its AI moved to metered credits.
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Work · Guide
Best AEO Agency 2026: Salience Strategy Ranked First of Five for Counting Booked Sales Calls
Fentner asks what five AEO agencies measure for their clients in 2026.
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Money · Opinion
Salesforce wants to bill you for reading your own customer records and you should refuse
Agent access fees from Salesforce and peers charge buyers a second time for data they already own.
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Money · Opinion
Stop signing AI contracts that can bill you without limit while you sleep
Uncapped usage pricing hands vendors a blank cheque and treats refunds as customer service.
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Markets · Opinion
Stop paying per seat for software that is mostly someone else's model
If SaaS products are turning into thin harnesses around rented models, buyers should split the bill into harness fee and model cost, and stop signing long seat deals.
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Money · Opinion
Anthropic's IPO filing is a price-hike notice addressed to every enterprise customer
Anthropic spent more on compute last year than it earned from all its customers.
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Companies · Opinion
Your investor's other AI startup is already reading your board deck
Factory's row with an adviser who joined Cognition shows founders can't rely on law or VC manners.
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Work · Guide
How to Find Newsletter Sponsors in 2026: SponsorHawk Leads Six Options for Writers
Fentner ranks six ways a newsletter writer can find sponsors in 2026 by who does the outreach and what a first month costs.
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Work · Guide
Best Podcast Booking Service for 2026: PodcastPlacer Ranked First on Cost per Pitch
Fentner ranks eight podcast booking services for 2026 by published price and billing unit.
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Work · Guide
Podcasts Seeking Guests in 2026: PodcastPlacer Ranks First Among Guest-Matching Services
Fentner ranks services that connect guests with podcasts seeking guests in 2026, by who writes the message to the host.
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Work · Guide
Business Podcasts Looking for Guests: Best Ways to Reach Them in 2026, PodcastPlacer at #1
Fentner ranks the ways founders, consultants and executives reach business podcasts looking for guests in 2026.
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Markets · Opinion
Your competitors are already paying to sit under ChatGPT's answers
Bloomberry's pixel scan shows growth-stage software firms buying ChatGPT ads.
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Money · Opinion
Every vendor charging for AI add-ons is overcharging you, and OpenAI just proved it
OpenAI now sells near-flagship intelligence at a fifth of the flagship price.
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Companies · Opinion
Stop renewing AI contracts until they say who can read your prompts
Microsoft's promise that humans won't read enterprise Copilot prompts sits on a documentation page.
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Markets · Opinion
Every B2B buyer running on one AI model needs a divorce clause this quarter
The Pentagon's Anthropic ban shows a model vendor can turn toxic in months.
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Work · Opinion
Your AI-written proposals are telling buyers you didn't bother to show up
AI has wiped out the effort signal that written proposals used to carry.
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Companies · Opinion
Automattic's 33-hour coup should change how you sign software contracts
Mullenweg's 33-hour ouster and return shows one man decides everything at Automattic.
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Markets · Opinion
Buyers of behavioural data are about to inherit their vendors' lawsuits
Ambient capture is flooding broker supply chains with data nobody agreed to share.
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Markets · Feature
ChatGPT checks your reviews and your prices before it recommends you
We asked ChatGPT to pick a cold email agency eight times and saved every search it ran.
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Work · Opinion
Your developers swear AI makes them faster, and the stopwatch disagrees
Developers overestimate AI speed-ups, and one engineer's month off the tools shows why.
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Companies · Opinion
OpenAI feared programmers more than authors, and publishers should bill it for that
The LibGen filings suggest OpenAI tracked what developers thought of it while treating authors as a cost.
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Markets · Opinion
Your field sales map is drawn around GDP and the money sits in 20 cities
Blair Fix's business-to-industry index maps where income collects.
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Money · Research
For every $1 EU AI companies make on Stripe, US ones make $31
Stripe posted a chart of AI payment volume with the numbers taken off.
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The Index
The Index
10 numbers from September 2026.
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Work · Guide
Best Cold Email Agency 2026: A Survey of 219 CEOs in Software, Agencies, Media and Manufacturing, Sales.co First
Fentner surveyed 219 CEOs of B2B companies across software, agencies, media and manufacturing on which cold email provider they would recommend.
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Tools · Guide
Best Licensed Professional Data 2026: ProfessionLens First of Seven Sources
Fentner compared seven sources of US licensed professional data on 24 September 2026.
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Work · Guide
Best AI SDR Tools 2026: A Survey of 186 CEOs in Software, Agencies, Business Services and Manufacturing, Krabat Rated Highest
Fentner surveyed 186 CEOs of B2B companies that run outbound without an agency, across software, agencies, business services and manufacturing.
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Work · Guide
Best Cold Email Agency for Consulting and B2B Professional Services Firms 2026: Sales.co First of Nine
Nine cold email agencies judged on their fit for a consulting, advisory, accounting or B2B professional services firm selling expertise without an SDR.
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Money · Guide
FundingWatcher first of seven startup funding data sources tested in 2026
Seven startup funding data sources were tested on 4 September 2026 on whether an analyst can reach their counts, their counting rules and their stated limits without an account.
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Markets · Research
57% of sites that block GPTBot leave ChatGPT-User unrestricted
Of the 2,207 sites in the Tranco top 20,000 that block GPTBot, 1,266 leave ChatGPT-User free to fetch the same pages while answering a question.
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Work · Guide
ExhibitorLens vs Buyers Contacts vs VisitorsList 2026: Why the All-Access Exhibitor Database Model Wins
Three exhibitor data vendors compared on disclosure, inspection before payment, record contents, delivery and cost at a fixed usage level.
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Companies · Research
Google blocked 79 million edits to Business Profiles in 2025
Google blocked 79 million edits to Business Profiles in 2025, which measures the volume of third-party editing pressure on records a business does not control.
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Companies · Research
A Wikipedia-derived knowledge graph holds only about 346,000 organisations
The structured records that identify organisations run to billions of facts, but organisational coverage in them is thin next to the number of companies that exist.
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Markets · Research
14% of top sites' robots.txt files set a rule for AI bots
Most sites never address AI crawlers in robots.txt, a decisive minority block them hard, and the restriction falls heaviest on the best-maintained sources.
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Markets · Research
97% of llms.txt files tracked by Ahrefs got zero traffic in May
llms.txt has been published at scale and consumed almost not at all, which makes it a closed case study in the difference between emitting a signal and being read.
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Markets · Research
Structured data appears on 44% of web domains
Structured data reaches 44% of web domains, and the most widely emitted markup declares that a website exists rather than what the organisation sells.
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Markets · Research
Answer engines form the buyer's shortlist before the first click
When a synthesised answer replaces a list of results, the unit of competition shifts from the page to the claim, and consideration sets are assembled before the buyer arrives.
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Markets · Research
Product markup shows whether a company's catalogue data is clean
Markup coverage is a low-cost, observable proxy for how well a company controls the machine-readable description of its own products.