Merlin Has Become a Scam
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ItsMe
I used to spread good words about Merlin but that will change moving forward.
Since purchasing my 20,000 credit limit per month LTD I have always been able to use Merlin when I needed it never running out of credits month after month.
Merlin as recently mad changes that exhaust my credits within a few queries which appears to have been done so they can push “update to pro” prompts.
I will never again recommend Merlin to anyone and I will be sure to spread the word so everyone is aware.
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ItsMe
Lucho You do not have to agree with me. I am not asking you to. However, I have been a Merlin customer since early in the beginning. I know what I used to be able to achieve and what I cannot achieve now.
I have not used a single new feature. I simple use Merlin for the chat feature only; nothing more.
Merlin often crashes without providing a response lately and uses credits for crashing. This also causes a need to click the refresh button eating up 2-3 times the number of credits.
I have tested with multiple models and credits are eaten up at the same rate regardless of which model I select.
Although Merlin may be adding new features they are going down hill fast and will die a slow death at this rate.
I don't really need Merlin; I only use it to chat because I purchased the credits to do so. I have always only ever used Merlin for occasional chat which never led to eating up 20,000 credits. Now a couple of chats and those credits are up in smoke with nothing gained because Merlin cannot complete a single chat session without timing out or crashing.
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Lucho
ItsMe In my case Merlin has always been an occasional and fallback tool.
I agree that it struggles with long chats (long context), for that ChatGPT is a better option. However, it still helps me with punctual tasks like image editing and creating craft prototypes.
Sincerely, I lowered my expectations one year ago and I never expected any big improvements for Merlin's AI Chat and extension, even less now that OpenAI is competing directly with an official chrome extension and that's a losing battle.
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Lucho
Hey guys!
I've been also very critic about Merlin. Recently letting LTD users out of the new Agent Mac app.
However, I don't identify at all with your comments:
- ItsMe Exhausting credits: More features mean more credits burn out. According to your query task complexity, always check before pressing ↳ if you really need a frontier model, if you really need web search, or if you really need expert mode. When chatting with websites,Gemini 3 Flashis the best balanced option.
- Endre No option to simply start a chat: You can fix that easily with this extension. Once installed, click onOptions, set the urlhttps://www.getmerlin.in/chat, then go tochrome://extensions/shortcutsand set your key shortcut (I use Cmd+Shift+M). That's all 😉 - You can see the attached pics for guidance.
I only recommend the
Quick URL Shortcuts
extension because it does not use read permissions or any resources. You can check here the scan reportPhoto Viewer
View photos in a modal
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Endre
Lucho It's very kind of you to suggest such a workaround. However, the extension shouldn't have been "enshittified" in the first place, requiring a workaround to access a discontinued basic function. I might as well just type the ChatGPT web address into a new tab, or even into this workaround.
By the way, this isn't the only problem. Merlin is simply too dumb compared to ChatGPT, even if the same model (e.g., 4o-mini) is selected. I'd bet they've under-calibrated the model on the back-end; perhaps they lowered the reasoning_effort, or maybe they're using a system prompt that reduces costs at the expense of making the model dumber.
So, this makes the workaround not so valuable after all. Though, that's not your fault. 🙌
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Lucho
Endre A suggestion remains a suggestion. It's up to you to decide what is better for you.
Since the pace of treating requests in this site has slowdown, personally I prefer to find solutions by myself, I guess that's still valuable after all.
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Endre
I started not using it when it began to function in such a way that it always wanted to process the content of the current website, with no option to simply start an independent conversation. (So, for some time now, we are forced to only chat with Merlin about the website, there's no [✕] to get rid of the website connection).
Because of this, I haven't encountered such a credit problem, so I can't confirm it, and right now I don't exactly know how I could test it properly. If you have a tip, I would test it too (I never ran out of credits before, ever since I subscribed).