Honestly incredible what @Replit did and very honest of them. There were no hidden T&Cs crippling expectation, but met and exceeded them.
Sometimes I felt guilty and that I was abusing their kindness.
Excited to soon share the 2 native apps I built.
We broke all the records
This weekend as part of our 10 year celebration, we made @Replit free.
And Engineering showed up.
Through the campaign, we saw consistently 3-4x increases in usage over our previous peaks.
Some of our power users came READY.
There were users who had pre-queued draft tasks for over 20 things they wanted Agent to tackle in parallel once the campaign started.
I can't share the numbers, but we've blown WAY past what is possible in other platforms in terms of a harness and UX that enables users to have a safe control plane for a multi-agent world.
I am excited about this future!
Fintechs in 2026 keep treating trust like a feature: biometrics here, zero-trust there, compliance dashboard somewhere.
But the customer doesn't audit your stack. They audit your brand.
In trust-sensitive industries, every touchpoint signs the same contract β or breaks it.
McKinsey's new fintech report settled an old debate: when anyone can ship a product in a week, trusted distribution is the moat.
You can't prompt a brand into existence. You earn it.
The ones still treating brand as a Q4 line item will learn this the hard way.
When output is free, judgment is the product.
AI just collapsed the 6-week, $20K design workflow into an hour for $10. The deliverable was never the moat. The decisions were.
Strategy before style β especially when output costs nothing.
57% of fintech users want AI in the app. The same users want human guardrails when money moves.
That's not a feature problem. It's a brand problem.
Trust isn't "we use AI." It's knowing where the human stays β and saying it before they ask.
In healthtech, your messaging isn't marketing copy β it's the trust contract.
A patient reading your site is deciding whether to bet their well-being on you.
Tone, terminology, and clarity aren't style choices. They're risk decisions.
"Humanised Hybrid Intelligence" β 2026's polite term for: AI does the volume, humans own the judgment.
In fintech, healthtech, and cybersecurity, that judgment layer isn't a finishing touch. It's the entire product.
Output is cheap. Accountability is the brand.
AI made "good enough" free.
Which means good enough doesn't differentiate anyone anymore.
In fintech, healthtech, and cybersecurity, the only thing left to compete on is trust. And trust isn't a feature you ship. It's the system underneath the brand.
Fintechs are now hiring Chief Trust Officers and tracking trust scores instead of churn. Good move. But a title doesn't fix a homepage that still says "your data is safe with us." Trust isn't a role. It's the whole system β strategy, copy, UI, proof.
Brand is back.
When AI lets everyone ship "good enough" work at the same speed, clarity and trust become the only real differentiators.
In fintech, healthtech, cybersecurity, "can I trust you?" isn't a marketing problem. It's the business.
54% of Americans now use ChatGPT to research financial products.
If your brand isn't structurally consistent across every touchpoint, AI skips you.
In fintech, trust used to be earned from humans. Now it's extracted by machines β or you're invisible.