introduction

there's a common sentiment of hate towards products that are wrappers around something -- mostly from the non-innovators. ppl tend to dismiss things as "just a wrapper" and mock them.

but how much does the argument really make sense? does building a wrapper mean that you're a shit show of innovation? does the future belong to wrappers or to the ppl powering them?

i think to answer any of it one needs to think from a first principles perspective

my experience around building and pitching wrappers

iirc one of my initial encounter around the argument of wrappers was during the pitch of my final year project. "if you're going to automate workflows via APIs, where's you effort?" my HOD mocked, am i supposed to then work for these products and develop a solution on their infra to use in my project?

the most recent one was during a classroom activity, a role-play debate where i played the role of a CEO of a cloud provider and against me was another cloud provider, we both had to pitch our services to 2 clients (e-commerce store and educational institute)

i positioned myself as a PaaS built on AWS with 3 pricing tiers - indie, business (suitable for e-comm) and enterprise (on-prem deployment, suitable for educational institute). my competitor posed as the swiss army knife of cloud infra - IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, GPUs, AR rooms, AI models, AI sdks (like what?) - literally the holy grail of infra all under one roof and no i am not dismissing them - it was just a role play so why not?.

after back and forth Q&A between providers and clients, it was observers' turn to pass a judgement on which cloud provider is a better choice. one particular guy laughed "he's just a wrapper around AWS -- how can he provide services for 20$?". only if my guy knew vercel is the exact description of this, but the audacity to call out like that as if he never used vercel was really surprising.

what is innovation?

if there's any takeaway from my experiences, there's only one - "people draw conclusions from their ass" and that you should not be "people". being a bare metal is often seen as a sign of innovation and it surely is, wrappers on the other hand are perceived to be lazy and unambitious. i find the best ai product from india is Bhindi AI which again... yess its a wrapper.

so then how would you define innovation in this era of ai that we're advancing towards? the innovation has always been within the idea of abstraction for consumer use. lets talk about iphones for instance, we all love iphones its a true masterpiece of engineering. inside it has processor, memory, storage and what not. but nobody gives a single f*ck about it, no one cares what transistors were used. we only expect tap, swipe and scroll.

now you know the best part? apple doesn't mine or even process its own silicon for its chips, they don't build their own screens either (they outsource it from samsung). but does that degrade their status as a brand? i don't think so

so innovation at the end somehow comes down to value creation. you could build a kickass infra and provide value to the wrappers or become a wrapper yourself and build on top of existing infra for consumers to use. if you achieve either of it, you have cracked innovation.

L0 - the foundation

these are the god fathers for innovation, they empower other companies by providing them resources to build their products. matter of fact, they provide the most value in an ecosystem, with the most skilled talent to be found here. these companies however do not produce for consumerism

L1 - the interface

companies here often operate bare metal with the help of resources from L0 to build solutions for consumerism. it often acts as an interface for L0 resources (for eg. AWS is an interface to vercel to access compute resources). consumers can have direct access to these products.

L2 - the actual wrappers

anything that is built on top of the products in L1 reside here. abstraction for consumerism is the moat for products at L2. when building products at this layer most efforts go into engineering an experience that is appreciated by the users. most of the hyped startups (also yc-backed) fall into this layer

how to build moat in the era of wrappers

1. user experience is everything

take cluely for example, if there's anything worth appreciating other than their marketing and distribution, its the ux of their product. while most ai products locked themselves in into a chat interface, cluely provided us with a floating widget on screen that sees and listens to your activities.

experience is your first line of defensibility. wrappers can be copied, APIs can be replaced, but a truly elegant, frictionless user experience sticks.

2. feedback loop

“i think this is literally where the rubber meets the road, if you are out there in particular places understanding that user better than anyone else and having the software actually work for those people, thats the moat"

- gary tan (ceo, y-combinator)

feedback loops are how you turn usage into insight and insight into improvement. Your wrapper can be as clever as you want, but if it doesn’t evolve to meet users’ real needs, competitors will outpace you.

a well-built feedback loop turns your abstraction into a self-reinforcing moat: users stay because it works better than alternatives, and the product improves faster than competitors can copy.

hypothesis

Innovation is not about touching the rawest layer of technology. True innovation in this era of AI and digital products is about abstracting complexity into something humans can actually use.

The winners are those who can:

1. understand the layers of abstraction (L0 → L2) and operate where they can maximize impact.

2. build frictionless user experience in their products

3. build feedback loops that continuously improve the wrapper based on real usage.

In short: the depth of your abstraction, combined with how well it serves humans, is the moat.

conclusion

looking back at my experiences — from HODs mocking “wrappers” to classroom debates and real-world product analysis — wrappers are misunderstood, often underestimated, but fundamentally transformative.

we saw it with the launch of gpt-5 the ai bubble i slowly bursting, less hype and less "we're going to be replaced". so its safe to say that fundamental infra itself isn't the future of innovation. in the coming years, the tech will only get better and we'll be witnessing more wrappers being built than ever not just in software but across every domain in the world.

whether you’re building L0 resources, L1 interfaces, or L2 consumer-facing wrappers, the principle is the same: make complexity usable, create human value, and build a defensible moat around experience and insight.