Remember that clever little app you used to track your expenses? The one with the cute piggy bank icon? It’s gone now. Not dead—just swallowed. Last year, a big-name tech firm bought it, stripped it for parts, and folded the pieces into their own bloated platform. You probably didn’t even notice until the email arrived: “We’re sunsetting the app to focus on bigger things.” Bigger things. Right.

This is the great software consolidation, and it’s happening everywhere. Startups that once promised to disrupt giants are now being gobbled up by them. It’s like watching a nature documentary where the little fish gets eaten, except here the little fish spent years building something beautiful, only to become a feature in someone else’s ecosystem. Honestly, most people overlook this because the acquisitions are often quiet—no splashy headlines, just a blog post and a redirect link. But the pattern is unmistakable.

Take what happened with Mailbox, the email app that made you feel like you could actually conquer your inbox. In 2013, it was the darling of productivity nerds everywhere. Swipe to archive? Genius. Then Dropbox bought it, and a couple years later, poof—shut down. The team was absorbed into Dropbox’s main product, and users were left scrambling for alternatives. Why does this keep happening? Because for every startup that dreams of going public, there’s a bigger company with a checkbook and a hunger for talent, technology, or just eliminating a threat.

I saw this up close a few years back when a friend’s startup—a nifty project management tool—got acquired by a software conglomerate. The founders were ecstatic at first. Champagne corks popped. Then reality set in: their product was slowly dismantled, the team scattered across different divisions, and the original vision evaporated. The users? They got a migration path to the parent company’s clunky alternative, which nobody wanted. I still remember my friend saying, “We thought we were joining forces, but we were just being digested.” It stuck with me.

Now, you might think consolidation is just business as usual. And sure, acquisitions have always been part of the tech landscape. But the scale and speed today are different. In 2021 alone, global M&A deals in the software sector topped $600 billion, according to some reports. That’s a lot of startups vanishing into the maws of Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, and the like. The result? Fewer choices for us, the users. It’s subtle at first—your favorite tool gets a new logo, then a few features disappear, then one day it’s just a tab inside a mega-suite you never asked for. Does anyone actually enjoy using software that feels like a corporate cafeteria?

But let’s not pretend it’s all doom and gloom. Sometimes consolidation works. When a startup joins a larger company, it can get the resources to scale in ways it never could alone. Think of Instagram under Facebook—love it or hate it, the app reached billions because of that acquisition. And for founders, a buyout can be a well-deserved payday after years of ramen-fueled coding. Yet, there’s a nagging feeling that we’re losing something essential: the quirky, opinionated software made by small teams who actually care about one thing. Instead, we get homogenized platforms that try to do everything and excel at nothing.

So, what’s a user to do? Honestly, I’ve started paying more attention to the indie software scene—tools built by tiny teams or solo developers who pledge to stay independent. They’re not immune to acquisition, but there’s a certain stubbornness there. And next time you hear about a startup getting bought, maybe pause before celebrating. Ask yourself: will this product still exist in two years, or is it just another snack for the software giants? Because once these tools disappear, we’re left with fewer alternatives, and that’s a loss we all feel, even if we can’t quite put our finger on why.