Let me open with something most founders wouldn't: almost none of the cleaning logic in Unfurl is mine.
The rules that decide what counts as a tracker ClearURLs, Brave's lists, AdGuard's URL Tracking filter, the EasyList lineage. The $removeparam syntax I parse uBlock Origin's. The "pull the real link out of a redirect" idea Brave called it debouncing years ago. I didn't invent any of it. I read a lot and leaned hard into open standards, on purpose.
So when someone asks about the moat, the honest first answer is: it isn't the cleaning. Which raises the actual question, and the reason I'm starting this thread once the hard knowledge is already open source, what's left to build?
First, the terrain because the tradeoffs are the interesting part.
Even I would love to see that becoming a native feature from macOS and Safari! 🤭