Articles about AI age faster than milk in summer. Three texts from this blog got mail over the past few weeks — one of them an obituary.
Flowise: The Toolbox Is Closed
Back in July we clicked a chatbot together with Flowise — without a line of code, with Qdrant as its memory. That tool no longer exists in that form.
At the end of July the Flowise team froze development, in mid-August they archived the project on GitHub, and since 31 August it is officially over: no support, no Discord, no updates. The company behind it was bought by Workday back in August 2025 — so the ending doesn't come entirely out of nowhere.
More interesting is the reasoning, and it's unusually honest. Paraphrased, the team says: connecting boxes hits a wall fast once workflows get complex. And developers now prefer to build those same workflows with AI coding assistants that simply write the code.
Put differently: the visual builder was overtaken by exactly the AI it was built for. This blog is itself such a case — built by one of those assistants. You can find that creepy or consistent. Probably both.
What does it mean for you? If Flowise runs on your machine, it keeps running. The code is open source (Apache 2.0 licence) and stays on GitHub; your Docker container notices none of this. But there are no security updates any more. A Flowise hanging openly on the internet is a bad idea from now on — behind your home router it's still perfectly fine.
Anyone starting fresh should look elsewhere. Langflow is the closest relative and looks almost identical. n8n does more than just AI, comes out of Berlin and is therefore the most relaxed route for GDPR questions. And Dify aims directly at chatbots with your own documents — exactly what we built in July.
MiniMax: Team Plans Gone, Prices Up
MiniMax — the cheap model from China that proofreads every article on this blog — has tidied up.
The team plans are history — and more thoroughly than it first looks: since 5 September nobody can buy one new any more, and nobody can renew one either. An existing subscription runs until its next renewal date, then it gets cut off. Leftover credit on team accounts can be spent but not topped up. That's not grandfathering, that's a deadline.
Private accounts are unaffected. For everyone, the personal token plans remain.
And those got more expensive, by almost exactly 10%. Entry level currently costs 22 instead of 20 dollars, the middle tier 55 instead of 50, the big one 132 instead of 120. Two older tiers were dropped entirely.
Before anyone lights the outrage torch: for 22 dollars you currently get roughly 1.7 billion tokens a month. By our syllable rule of thumb from back then, that's roughly 850 million words — about eight thousand novels. Per month. For the price of lunch for two.
For comparison: for about the same money, ChatGPT or Claude put a message limit in your way long before you get anywhere near that scale. So even after the increase, MiniMax remains what it was: outrageously cheap.
More interesting than the two dollars is the direction. In this market models normally get cheaper, not pricier. When even the price breaker corrects upward, that says more about the real cost of AI than any press release.
OpenRouter: A Door in Europe
Best news last. OpenRouter — one access point, hundreds of models — has gained an EU endpoint.
Instead of the normal address, you send your requests to eu.openrouter.ai. Your key stays the same, so does the model list. The difference: the request is decrypted only inside the EU and passed on only to providers based in the EU themselves. If none of them is available, there's no quiet detour via the US — the request simply fails.
On top of that there's a switch for the whole team: enforce the EU region, and every request that wanted to go elsewhere comes back as a hard error. Not "that'll probably be fine", but "no". That's the difference between a statement of intent and a guardrail.
And yes, the DPA exists too. For commercial use, a data processing agreement applies via the terms of service, including EU Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers out of the European Economic Area. A signed copy is available on request. That makes OpenRouter genuinely usable for GDPR purposes — something you couldn't say about a US aggregator a few months ago.
The catch: all of this starts at the Business tier. No minimum spend, no contract, you enable it yourself in the settings — but OpenRouter then takes an 8% surcharge on your credit instead of 5.5%. On my two to three euros a month that's pocket change. For a small company it's still less hassle than a separate EU provider per model.
A residue of caution remains: this is OpenRouter's own promise, not an audited certificate. Anyone processing strictly regulated data should still read the small print themselves — or stay with a provider like Cortecs, which sits entirely inside the EU anyway. For everybody else this is a big step in the right direction, and one that the comparison with the data collectors puts in proper perspective.
What's Left
Three announcements, three directions: a tool disappears because AI made it redundant. A provider gets pricier and is still the cheapest. And an American service seriously builds a European door.
None of it is an earthquake. Together, though, they describe rather well where we currently stand: the market is sorting itself out — and it does so faster than you can update your own tutorials.
Unpaid recommendations, my own opinion — as always here.