Merlin Reviews

This once-great product has slowly, without explanation, become a credit hog.

Now it barely works at all - it just sputters for hours when "thinking" about a prompt.
The behavior and lack of response from the company reminds me of Reelcraft. If you haven't been using your copy, keep an eye on it because where there is smoke, there is fire.

I guess LLMs are not the way to go on Appsumo. It seems to attract calculating vendors with bad intent. In fact, there is another "playground"-like product I bought at the top tier that has done nothing wrong to date, but I am refunding it because I just feel that these deals are not safe.

I want to be clear, AppSumo is a great company and has honored its "got your back" promises, and beyond. Most of the products are great. Even Rumble Studio, which was on years ago, notified AppSumo customers of a massive update that grandfathered us into.

But kinds of vendors in the LLM and Text to Talk industries are not panning out as they draw thieves and flies. I think I'll stick to the course publishing and LinkedIn search vendors.

I purchased TIER 2 with 12,000 credits to use the various LLMs freely and without limitations (at least for me), but now I am forced to purchase the PRO plan from Merlin for €12/month (at best) in order to freely use the more advanced models, which still use up credits.
I believe this is a total lack of seriousness on the part of Merlin AI and, if AppSumo was aware of this policy on the part of the latter, on its part as well.
At the moment, it is only possible to use models that cost 1 credit per request:
GPT 4o mini
Gemini 2.5 flash
Deepseek v3(US-hosted)
Gemini 2.0 flash
Claude 3 Haiku

Merlin is no longer the tool it once was.

* They are nickle-and-diming users without clearly stating in their UI that things like "web search" cost 2x points for every request --- has anyone else heard of such a thing?
* They LIED about my usage and FAILED to produce (on TWO occasions now) a record of my points and exactly why my points disappeared so quickly, even though they have a record because they explicitly refer to it
* When asking about this and showing them the math, they explained my usage by referring to queries I didn't make at the time I sent the email which shows they are not paying attention
* Have had multiple tickets closed immediately after they were replied to, rather than seeing if I was satisfied - this is a BIG no-no, as I have had follow-up questions every time

I was an early adopted from AppSumo into Merlin and invested a bunch of money into them (one of my biggest AppSumo purchases ever). It's sad to be treated this way after as much as I've loved and enjoyed using this product. This is a failure of 1. the UI not being clear, 2. Lying/falsifying usage stats (if they weren't lying I assume they would want to prove it like I asked them to), 3. Really poor customer service.

Please get it together Merlin. It's rough being treated like a second-rate customer when I was an early-believer in you.

very happy with this tool, now i need to upgrade my tier so it will be very nice if they offer again in appsumo

I wasn't sure whether to trust this option since plenty of competitors are around with similar offerings. I picked it up because I was trying to save money from paying for ChatGPT or Gemini.

I have benefited from the different options in AI models I can use and the quick to access widget.

Organizing chats is not intuitive but I'm guessing it's related to me not putting enough time to learn how it's all structured. I have been simply using the chats for anything I can think of.

I have also used the image generators several times.

I hope they stay around for a long time.

I like the quickness to interact with the active browser page or the ability the seamlessly change AI models in the same chat. I like that it's quick to respond and not bloated.

I primarily use chats so still need to explore the other tools available.

As for managing the chats, it's a little confusing at times why the delete button only appears in a specific tab and doesn't show up at all in the widget window. There are also a few different chat window versions and they don't have the same functions so I sometimes lose time trying to find out the version I need.

When it comes to history and organizing previous chats, without going into the documentation, it's not intuitive how I am expected to group chats into categories for easy reference and access. ChatGPT gives a quick way to sort chats by date or something else. The "pin" option isn't available in every window so there are some extra steps and friction at times.

Not a deal breaker but that's the first barrier I noticed when using the tool when compared to ChatGPTs interface