AI is going to kill app subscriptions
nichehunt.app
nichehunt.app
Having the ideas necessary to know what to write is where practically all the value lies (caveat: there is value in doing the same as someone else but better, or cheaper.) AI can help with that, but only in so much as telling you the basics or filling in the blanks if you're really stuck. It can't tell you the 'clever bit' because that is by definition new and interesting and doesn't appear in the training data.
What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.
I bet it would burn a lot of money very fast and not just on tokens.
Bang on, and Jira is the perfect example! Because Jira isn't a bag of features: Jira is a list of features and the way they fit together (well or poorly, depending on your opinion).
That's the second-order product design that it's going to take next-gen coding AI workflows to automate. Mostly because that bit comes from user discovery, political arguments, sales prioritization, product vision, etc. It's a horrendous "art" of multi-variable zero-sum optimization.
When products get it right (early Slack) then it's invisible because "of course they made it do the thing I want to do."
When products get it wrong (MS Teams, Adobe Acrobat, Jira, HR platforms) then it's obvious features weren't composed well.
Expect there's more than one {user discovery} -> {product specification} AI startup out there, working on it in a hierarchical fashion with current AI now.
For the vast majority of companies they would (and should) rather let the SaaS figure that out and focus on their actual company
Cloning Slack and wasting ultra-expensive engineers on that might be more expensive, and it's not your core mission.
PS. If you're claiming that coding an application is ultra-expensive, you are already entering the argument on the side of the comment you're arguing against, which is making a counterpoint to the article, which claims in the first sentence:
> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.
Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.
Neither of those software are primarily responsible for the revenue, either. The actual models underlying them are, not the trivial CLI chat interface (which, despite being trivial software, still manages to be full of bugs that go unfixed for months). I also don't even think it's true that Codex is primarily agent-written. OpenAI specifically cited using Electron in their recent Codex desktop application for "agent orchestration" to save human developer time on porting it across platforms, which does not sound like a successful exercise in eating their dog food.
So they say.
Shouldn't they be in place to replace absolutely every other tech company? That is tens of trillions of valuation in short few years.
People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It would be both a huge cash cow and the best possible advertising that AI-facilitated software development is truly the real deal 10x force multiplier they claim.
If someone invents a special shovel that can magically identify ore deposits 100% of the time, they aren't going to sell it with the rest of the shovelmongers. They're going to keep it to themselves and actually mine gold.
For now though, building smarter models / general integration tooling is a better us of model companies' capital.
Once/if performance gains plateau, expect you'll see them pivot right quick to in-house software factories for easily cloneable, large TAM product spaces, then spin off those products if they're successful.
They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.
It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!
Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?
If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?
Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?
What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?
Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?
Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.
Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?
My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.
In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.
To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.
Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.
Essentially, this experience will be the most common one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1r6olcv/an...
My guess is two-fold. One, they are specialized in AI. Two, building another anthropic is a big moat and they like to keep it big vs what you could build with it.
Those apps aren't that bad, it's just internet people complaining about things like react.
Imo "higher quality" isn't a way to sell software
I think in the modern world people would absolutely sell the special shovel, because even if you have a better product that doesn't mean people are going to be using it. You need to have a much better product for a long time for that to happen. And being much better than the competition is hard.
The companies don't lose anything. The employees and executives are not losing anything.
Welcome to business.
There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of them, imo.
Good riddance to this hellscape of a market. We now face the dawning of a new slopocalypse era, and its whole new set of problems.
The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisions instead of paying $5 a month for someone else to do that work. Comparative advantage doesn’t just apply to the cost of writing code, but also the effort of making product decisions.
Edit: I don’t mean that a grocery app should cost $5/month, the grocery app was a toy example and the $5/month refers to an example of a separate app you’d pay for with much more value.
Given the number of apps put there, from dozens of OSS hobbyist apps to industrial resturant inventory management ones, I wan't alone in thinking this is a solved problem and someone should just have the perfect interface for it. Between auto-unit converting apps, natural language processing apps, @cooklang, a million ideas about tracking pantries and ingredients and their categories, frequency of use charts, etc..
Then one time I went on a trip with a friend to his home town where we stayed at his parents house. His 78 year old mother had a 2 notepads attached to the fridge with a pencil on a string. As she worked in the kitchen, between washing hands she would just jot down random notes, cross others, doddles some on one notepad, and the other she would just add meal plans as she went along. Then when we were going to market she just ripped the page off.
Sounds so fucking simple and easy and I felt so stupid for the amount of effort I put trying to figure out the right app, the right device to mount on my fridge, how to connect power to it. How to make it not always on to blind me at night, but also so I don't have to keep fiddling with it to unlock it. how to use it with wet fingers, how to keep translating units and "catch up" when I miss updating it for a couple of meals, how to hide ingredients I don't care about and highlight ones I do, how to rearrange the interface. It seriously gave me a pause at how dumb I was that the solution is much much simpler and I pigeon holed my thinking on a tech solution for some reason.
Can't sell people notepads though. There is no margin or lock-in in that stuff.
Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.
It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.
But for apps that have a lot of ceiling, people will still gravitate to apps that have had more care and attention than someone vibe coding it once and throwing it on the store, just like how people choose those well-built and maintained apps today over using their built-in Reminders app.
I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It's the kind of thing that would be incredibly difficult to scale but works just fine when you only have one user. No SaaS grocery app can hope to compete with me being able to tailor my own shopping list app to my exact preferences.
I just don’t think most people will end up doing that just like how most people don’t 3D print their own desk drawer organizers even when Gridfinity does all the work for you. Automation doesn’t fully replace the volition to build a thing and make tricky decisions that are familiar to us software engineers but not others.
Your grocery store has a free API you can use? Even if that is the case, that will then soon change. If app building becomes "free" then the cost will shift over to the data access.
The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution is awesome, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's now possible. But what I've found is that even with AI assistance, there are so many interconnected decisions that make this more than a one-shot prompt project.
I pushed for us to build a mobile app specifically to take advantage of portability (use it at home for planning, at the store for shopping) and the camera (image recognition with OpenAI and scanning barcodes with expo-camera). That sounds simple, but it cascades into hundreds of UX decisions about offline-first architecture, gesture patterns, camera permissions, and more.
The units and quantities problem mentioned in this thread is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to figure out a data model that mirrors how people naturally think about groceries: how they categorize items, how they plan meals versus staples versus impulse buys, how they track what's running low. Modeling those mental models is genuinely hard.
What helps is that I worked as an ecommerce shopper at Whole Foods, and I learned that stores are meticulously organized with numbered bays and predetermined routes optimized for efficiency. Translating that knowledge into a system that can intelligently sort a shopping list based on store layout (which varies by location!) and typical shopping patterns is genuinely complex.
One of my teammates put it well: this is a simple idea, but it requires a level of care, expertise, and experience to get it right. AI's incredibly helpful for implementing solutions once we've made these decisions, but the decisions themselves require domain knowledge, user research, and taste. That's the part that's hard to automate, and it's what makes this a real engineering project rather than a weekend Claude experiment.
For anyone without dev or product experience, getting beyond a basic feature set and keeping it running reliably (or roll it out to > 1 user) is still a massive challenge.
could be an unfortunate thing of the author growing up in an era of gated ecosystems.
however much of the software out there - is via web - and some desktop - some internal use - some external - some shit without ui - some billed yearly, some billed by subscriptions
but I guess tell us how AI is gonna kill subscriptions
At one point I had an idea I brought to AI, got ready to code it, then said "wait, someone has to have done this before me", sure enough, found it, written with warp!
So I can't say it'll kill all app subscriptions, but AI is definitely enabling people to finally make reality out of that idea they've had rattling around their heads but never took the time to realise.
Think Vercel, Supabase, et al. Because most of the time agents prefer glueing together managed services than building from scratch, unless they're told otherwise.
And if I'm someone building a custom in-house solution to replace a SaaS subscription product, I'm going to pay lower managed costs without blinking.
That all said, I could see some killer features coming to AI companies if they really want to make a dent.
Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.
Good riddance to software subscriptions.
I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).
No need to pay for someone else’s one.
Counter argument ... at what point is software still profitable to be sold?
I am running my Office 2007 still, and that thing is now almost 20 years old. That was a one time sale, with no other revenue for Microsoft.
I am not condoning subscriptions but one time selling software only works good, if your a small team with low overhead. The more you sell, the more support becomes a issue. And normal customers do not pay for support.
Making software now has become easier with LLMs but the same problem keeps existing in regards to support. Sure, you can outsource this to LLMs but lets just say that is problematic (being kind).
So unless you plan on making software that is not heavily supported/updated, and keep a low single/team cost...
If you sold a program for a one time fee of ... $39.
What if somebody now sells the same for $29 with LLMs. And the next guy in China does it even cheaper because his overhead is even smaller. Eventually you get into abandonware where software is made to just eat sales from the bigger guy and that is it.
Unless you focus on companies, and they have way less issue paying for subscriptions (if it includes support). You see the issue. People kind of overlook the cost of actually running a self employed job or a company (this is a MAJOR cost the moment you need to hire somebody).
So no, i do not see subscriptions going away because companies will pay for it. And on the normal consumer level, paid support as the solution?
I also buy the argument that a lot of time people are actually paying for cloud storage. While I'd love to see a generic protocol for cloud or self-hosted storage that every app can sync to, I expect we'll continue to see subscription software persist by locking down and gatekeeping cloud storage and sync, too.
But really I would be happy for that to go away.
I don't use much software that's sold in any way[0], and I'd prefer it to be none. The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.
[0] I do donate to projects I like and use, though
This works for some software (developer tools is the prime example) but not so much for other things. Who is going to maintain the MTD software I used for my VAT returns without recompense. Who is going to update the PAYE payroll software I relied on.
Even with developer tools I feel we will lose something without companies like JetBrains. There would be no Kotlin without people paying for their software.
That's before you think about huge corporations leeching off of our free work or the AI companies vacuuming up open source only to regurgitate it for $200 a month.
Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.
Most people in most situations pay as little as they can get away with not as much as they value the product or service.
The only time this is arguably somewhat untrue is when the point of having the thing is to signal wealth, but even someone buying e.g. a Rolex wants to do so as cheaply as possible, so it's only really true when they're directly spending the money in front of people (think bar, restaurant, nightclub, etc.)
I agree that right now it's mostly developer tools that are doing best in terms of open source. But browsers, operating systems, 3D modelling software, image/photo editing, and many others are not so far behind either.
My assertion/belief[0], though, is that the direction of travel is for open source to become dominant in more and more classes of software, especially as AI reduces the cost of contribution and collaboration, and disincentivises closed, proprietary software.
[0] Based on what I and others around me have been able to do with AI already and how fast it is moving.
Seriously, you pay for software so people can make a living to improve it. It is a service like anything else.
Reasons why subscriptions may be a "better" than upfront licenses, even when the subscription cost more in the long run:
1. Cashflow management
2. Bypass budget approvals due to smaller amounts
Whether it made sense for you is mostly irrelevant. The question is whether it worked for the developer. You can read endless complaints about Adobe's subscription model but the profits kept rolling in.
As many have said, making stuff isn't the hard part. Making good stuff is the hard part.
Your point is based on wrong assumptions.
Sucks for the todo-list-for-x and pretty basic game app creators to have even more competition, but they weren't making bank from subscriptions anyway
This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have staying power. Ironically, the flood of cheap, low quality AI generated apps might make it harder for cheap apps to overtake bigger players, because overall trust in the ecosystem will go down.
See also: air traffic control.
The problem -- like self-driving cars that generally outperform humans but aren't allowed on the roads because occasionally they still screw up -- is primarily political, not technical. A rational point of view wouldn't demand perfect performances from machines that were never achieved by humans in the first place. Eventually lawmakers and regulators will get that through their heads, and we'll all be better off for it... but the transition will be a rough one.
People were saying that a decade ago, if not more, with machine learning outperforming radiologists. Today we don't have enough radiologists. What has changed since those days that one can again say that so confidently?
Some of the recent studies showing otherwise are literal junk science. They used flawed methodologies, such as blindly feeding the data to the models without access to medical histories that the human doctors would have benefited from (which favored the human radiologists substantially) and leaving labels on the training data (which favored the models.) When studies are conducted under more rigorous standards, the humans don't tend to win, and unlike the models the humans will not get better.
Non-experts will build progressively more interesting things as model capability goes up - but experts will always be able to produce yet more complex things than that.
So user expectations will keep rising.
The cost of software development will go down for software at and below some level of complexity, but up for anything above that level. The level where that tips will keep changing, just as it always has. To understand this, consider that tipping point across today’s and yesterday’s “hand-typed software”: it has been moving the whole time, thanks to frameworks and libraries and languages improving.
The world of software will remain much as it is today - a mix of free and non-free stuff. But on average and in the large it’ll be of way higher quality, and bring corresponding improvements in your quality of life.
My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.
My theory as an old guy is that the standards will just go up.
There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.
We’ve seen this before. A good example would be when the mobile app stores launched and you could get traction with just about anything. And then you couldn’t.
Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.
I'm not too sure about this. Very good design, at least in terms of marketing materials such as screenshots, may be end up signalling the use of AI in the coding as well. I know if an app has obviously-AI-generated photos in the screenshots I would be disinclined even to try it.
I don't know... Because the tool that solves a specific business problem usually requires tons of business expertise. And when company buy this tool, they mainly do it for the expertise diluted in it.
If they didn't already made their own in-house implementation, it's because they don't want to invest in maintaining the tool that requires expertise outside of their actual business.
Meanwhile, the company building the tool can invest in keeping this expertise because it's financed by the multiple companies paying for the tool.
This industry is in a deep quality slump. If it takes an existential threat to improve that, then it's all good news
Meanwhile the hand crafted app that does the same thing gets put in the same bucket as the AI slop ones and is ignored.
[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
If there is a feature that cannot be done on-device, and that on-Internet feature can be effectively moated and duplication-resisted, then if it’s a feature that people think they need they will absolutely open their wallets to pay for.
The trick is finding that feature or attribute that cannot be done on-device, and then moating it against AI duplication. Do that, make it appear indispensable in the minds of people, and they will absolutely pay for it.
App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?
It’s inevitable at this point.
Also, assuming a company has the capital to burn through enough tokens to create something so big and complex, why spend it on an internal tool? Shouldn't they be spinning slack-sized apps to expand their existing market share or try to disrupt new markets?
For the types of apps that AI can clone on its own, this has always been true. It's the eternal bookstore example, recipe collection, or my-dvd-collection app. The type of apps that Basic and Visual Basic were designed for.
If there was value in selling subscriptions to an app like this, it was probably coincidental.
The reason we pay a subscription is because the company that built the software knows our business, knows how to get in touch with the decision maker, and knows how to market their product as something desirable. The actual software has little influence in that decision.
On the contrary, I think the price of SaaS subscriptions will go up as a result of AI. Because the only customers who will switch to a cheaper (or home made) alternative are the ones for whom the software is a commodity. These customers used to form the long tail of subscriptions, usually on the lower tier. When the entry pricer disappears, and the software editor has to generate a high return for their investors, the only way to keep profitability is to increase the price for the other tiers.
This also got me thinking about open source might be dying. For this tool, there is no reason for me to open source it, anyone can create the same thing in minutes. I didn't add anything, the only maybe interesting part would be to share the prompt, but then someone else can create their own prompt to have their tool do what they want.
Software world is really getting weird.
More people with more agents freely contributing more to even more concentrated and scaled-up projects.
Those agents will get more potent. The projects can get more ambitious.
One user with N Claude usage. 100 users with 100x the Claude usage. Who can build the superior product? If you put the right structure on it, the 100x wins by a drastic margin. Those 100x Claudes benefit in combination courtesy of the open source effect, their potential additive value is greatly enhanced.
The 1x outcome will end up being relegated to triviality (the one page homepage as website). The bar is about to be raised really, really, really high in software if you want to be relevant. This is merely a very short transition period.
Automation of easy templated tasks will cause a huge disruption. Production of software used to be a skilled job, but now is automated to a large degree. This has huge impacts to the profession as a whole. Already, enrollment to the UC CS program is declining.
>This also got me thinking about open source might be dying.
Just because you can generate a wrapper app for a very specific use-case doesn't mean open source is dead or dying. As if open source was all just about people sharing their crappy specific use-case apps.
And software isn't getting weird. A part of the software development life cycle is being automated.
Probably wouldn't be a bad thing.
One of our top earners always was(is still) simple; companies to hire/fire cheap cans of devs, but cans of devs are crap quality (generally) so we help companies set up, based on their stack, guardrails preventing full out bloodshed. We always got a lot of flack from 'modern devs' because we take away the freedom; seems it was a good thing; llms + freedom is misery. Well, I guess it's also performance art of sorts.
For a company, paying $10K a year for a quality service, that's a no-brainer. Most companies spend that money on alcohol in company onsites. However, if you're charging really high prices (the Datadogs of the world), then you're going to face tougher competition from cheaper alternatives that might be as good as you, and when companies need to cut costs, which they often do, you'll be in trouble.
I think what it means to many software companies is that prices will significantly go down on average but the median might not see significant decrease. Companies will be smaller and more lean, hiring less people in general (not just engineers!). There will be more companies out there, so hopefully it will even out.
Last thing is that every product will have too many options to choose from. This has been the reality actually for a long time and going to get much worse. How you market and brand your product and acquire customers will become more difficult than ever.
"The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies. We're already seeing this play out in the numbers. Apple's App Store got 557K new submissions in 2025, up 24% from 2024 (source: Appfigures). That's not because people suddenly got more creative. It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude."
No. It's because people got more creative. There are tens of thousands of us who are absolutely on fire creating new products, better versions of old products, new product categories etc. Many of us are burnt out OG programmers who have rediscovered our love for programming. Now we can create without the drudgery.
You're about to see the most tech innovation our species has ever experienced. Hold on to your seat.
Nitpicking, but I would argue that people have always been creative, it's a function of our brains. With the ubiquity of camera, videos now show that even birds and animals have levels of creativity. Biological/physical/physics/societal restrictions prevent them from taking it to the next level. Look at what ancient peoples managed to achieve without the benefit of modern tools and techniques; hard to argue people haven't always been creative.
What has changed is the ability to implement our ideas and harness our creativity - that has become significantly simpler in the age of AI.
Perhaps the discrepancy between the OP's framing of what's happening (negative impact to developers because app cost has gone to zero) and your positive perspective (hey, look at all these creative ideas we are now implementing) is a matter of perspective: you're both describing the same phenomenon, just different angles.
With all due respect, we're definitely not. If any of what you said was even the faintest bit true, then we'd have something to show for it already.
My best bet is that some NYC traders take on agents was to post the same bullish take a million times in order to drive tech stocks (which make up the most of the market cap), and buy them for low.
This place is the worst at this too. I get you guys are very involved in writing code that is central to the existence of a software product - but you are not a product designer nor manager. Meaning you dont get people and how they view their choice set and more importantly how they make decisions.
For if you did.. you'd all be shipping your own products and highly successful. But most of you are not shipping your own products with large success behind it. So quit the crap.
When it comes to software subscriptions, the bar is just that much higher. Not only do you have to pass the threshold for someone to even adopt another app/website/brand, but now you have to provide enough utility to pay for it. Claude spitting out code for a good-enough clone of an app doesn't come anywhere near the threshold. An agent that can write the code, buy a domain, provision and maintain the database, and submit the app to the app store gets closer, but now it's not looking so cheap anymore, moreso in terms of your time commitment as defacto product manager than actual tokens and hosting costs.
The actual disruption of SaaS apps will come from agents that are capable of solving problems autonomously in a different way such that you don't even need the SaaS. I'm sure we'll get there in time, but not without a lot of data integrity and security issues, and rogue agent fuckups along the way.
It's identical to Craigslist hollowing out offline classified ads. Classified ads used to be a hyper lucrative market for newspapers (both local and national). That market imploded from ~$17 billion ($32b+ adjusted) in 2000 to $1-$2 billion last year. Once it could, it did.
AI should enable software to touch more things more cheaply (more efficiently in many cases). As it can, it will. Expect a lot more wipe outs.
There are free PDF editors, but that hasn't changed the fact people pay for them. I don't think this is going to work out like the article thinks it is, unless AI is really easy to use, and does a very good job, but there's always going to be that last 5% of quality that people will want to pay for.
What I think actually changes is the packaging. Per-seat subscriptions assumed humans in dashboards. That's the part on borrowed time. The workflow logic underneath still has value — it just gets consumed differently as agents start doing the clicking.
Yes and no.
I have created 15 small apps that solves all kinds of things for me. However, at the department I work full of non-technical people, most of them don’t even know lovable exists.
And for the one that does know lovable exists, they tend to build stuff with some botched backend and you’ll get to scaling issues, security issues and who knows what else
AI can produce mediocre or outright bad code no problem.
It was trained on the average, not just on Carmack level code...
It needs to be checked by a professional.
This won't ever change with LLMs or gen AI like it is now
Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.
IBM still sells mainframes but is no longer a growth darling.
> Markets are right to reassess multiples. But reassessing multiples is very different from pricing in extinction
What you are missing is that the SaaS companies were extremely overpriced. For instance, crm after all the carnage is still priced at 25 times earnings which is historically high for anything that is not a growth company. The perception was that these companies would print money year after year selling software trinkets on their platforms and as such were placed in the growth category. Now, it is plainly obvious that these software trinkets can be produced easily by anyone using AI. Their pricing-power has dramatically declined. Hence the re-rating. None of this contradicts the thesis in your ai-assisted article that these businesses have moats just like IBM and its mainframes. These businesses are now in a vicious reflexive narrative loop where the narrative will impact the real-world which will further fuel the narrative.
Never did tbh. These apps should be one time purchases at best.
Apple is being Apple and not letting me to release it however :(
This makes me excited about what we will see in the self hosted space. Cause now many can both set up say a S3 backend entirely on their own and write/vibe the code that users it.
Now I just need to figure out the iPhone app ecosystem haha (and how to implement mTLS on it)
It's like these companies are trying to get us hooked, then try to make us explode in frustration because it doesn't actually quite work. Not because the AI is bad, but because the interface (30-old-tech, a chat ui) is just broken.
- Open source - Outsourcing - Offshoring
It was driving the labour cost of an engineer to zero I felt as a young man.
Then time passed, and I learnt that engineers aren't paid to code. Engineers are paid to solve problems for a business.
If you recall, the dot.com bust and 9/11 crashed finances for a few years. When the money printing gun went whir because "Deficits don't matter" Washington, then engineers were in demand again.
Right now we are in a weird situation where money is being printed and it is also tight. Most of it is going to the hardware and infrastructure layer, like the fiber optic bubble in the dot.com. Software will have its time in the sun again.
Take a look at the history of the power loom which automated weaving in the 19th century. The number of handloom weavers dropped two orders of magnitude after the power loom.
I think what you are missing is that it might not be possible to stay in business if you can't use AI to solve problems.
Before the dot com bust, I was paid in college to file papers in file cabinets all day at an office. Ten years on from that, the paper was gone, the file cabinets were gone, obviously the paper filer job was gone and even that business that employed me as a paper filer was gone because they were a dinosaur who couldn't leverage technology well and were put out of business by competitors who could.
There is huge denial on this board that everything is going to be fine hand coding on the legacy systems of dinosaur companies. Seems more likely that if the company has so much technical systems debt that models aren't useful, those companies are not going to be competitive in their area of business.
Subscriptions arnt going away. Software will just be like cable and now streaming.
And even if you do build your own models, unless they run locally on the device, you still need to pay for hosting?
Those 3 are my top-of-the-head current app subscriptions I pay for.
Just because you can develop and/or run something locally on the cheap, doesn’t mean it’ll have the same value.
But if people want to make more good creative games and the store helps me find them I have plenty more money to shovel at them
"AI", the new Napster.
1. Local models or token cost plummets
2. Subscriptions more prevalent, given token costs
3. A single subscription (tokens) to rule them all
4. Apps with use-based pricing
If it’s easier to build software, that means there will be more software. Duh.
Henry Ford didn’t kill off cars because he perfected the moving assembly line, quite the opposite.
Yes, the guy who owns a boat and wants to track his calories is going to fuck around in claude code and figure out deployment, and sign up to some free PaaS and pay $1.38 a month to self host their app.
Sure.
most apps i use are not AI clone-able yet with AI’s current faculties. i’m not going to switch to an ai vibe code of Google Photos, Tailscale/Mulvadd VPN, or YouTube. For those three apps, i pay for cloud infrastructure. sure, you can say with enough AI i could vibe code a Tailscale backend system, but it sounds like it would take more tokens than my $20/mo ChatGPT plan PLUS a mountain of cloud provider bills and such to host my backend.
i do pay for some premium apps that run entirely on device, like Halide Camera. But there again, is my $20/mo tokens enough to clone a high quality image processing app, to such a degree i will trust it to capture precious memories effectively? ehh.
Thanks to AI abundance, everyone will be better off.
I'm seriously wondering if this blog is just some rage bait or if that guy is really that dumb? I can't tell anymore.
I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and everything else.
Can AI do all that? Sure, but you must know to ask for all that in the first place. Look what happened to Clawd/Molt.
> It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude.
Sure, why don't you deploy your vibe coded app over the weekend and see if it falls apart after handling one request per second
This article was written by AI btw
Unless there is inherent complexity in the problem (and assuming subscriptions don’t get pricey soon) I can see nontechnical people getting into designing their own apps.
It makes me think of 3d printing. A lot of people got into 3d modeling because of it. And a lot of people publish cute baubles 3d models (analogous to vibe coded ai wrappers?) but there is genuinely useful stuff that people not in the fabrication or 3d design industry create and share, some even making money off of it.
I just can’t think of a way saas margins will stay as high as they are now.
If there was a text based file format for models, it could generate those and you could hand that to the slicer. Like I’ve never looked, but are stl files text or binary? Or those 3mf files?
If Gemini can generate a good looking pelican on a bicycle SVG, it can probably help design some fairly useful functional parts given a good design language it was trained on.
And honestly if the slicer itself could be driven via CLI, you could in theory do the entire workflow right to the printer.
It makes me wonder if we are going to really see a push to text-based file formats. Markdown is the lingua franca of output for LLMs. Same with json, csv, etc. Things that are easy to “git diff” are also easy for LLMs…
It's just gimped to the point that you can basically only use it for hobbyist projects, anything reasonably professional looking is using STEP compatible files and that is much more complex to try to emulate and get right. STEP is a bit different - it's more like a mesh in that it contains the final geometry, but in BRep which is pretty close to the machining grade, while OpenSCAD is more like what you're asking about - a textual recipe to generate curves that you pass into an engine that turns it into the actual geometry. It's just that OpenSCAD is so wholly insufficient to express what professional designs need it never gets used in the professional world.
I think this is great for everyone to be a developer, the gatekeeping has now been removed and we will see a creative explosion of apps that everyone can build.
The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.
Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.
Let alone the issue when lots of meatbags with different skill levels are working on the same codebases.
I have barely seen any codebase that has been in production for a long time, that did not have glaring issues.
But if you tried to do a code audit, your spending somebody their time (assuming this is a pro), for a long time. Where as a AI with the correct hints on what too look for, can do insane levels of work, testing, etc...
Ironically, when you try to secure test a codebase, and you use multiple different LLMs, you get a very interesting list of issues they can find. Many that are probably in tons of production level software.
But its up to you, as the instructor of that LLM codebase, to actually tell it to do regular security audits of the codebase.
Sentences like this make me think AI is honestly the best thing that happened for my imposter syndrome. AI is great for simulating test case, and that's it. If you leave it, it write the most basic, useless tests (i mean, half of them might be usefull when you refactor, but that's about it). It can't design reusable test components and have trouble with test double, which i would think is the easiest test case for AI. Even average devs like me write test double faster than AI, and i'm shit at writing tests.
AI is also extremely bad at understanding versionning, and will use a deprecated API for no reason except increasing the surface of attack.
AI is great for writing CLI scripts, boilerplate and autocomplete. I use it for frontend because i'm shit at it (even though i have to clean its shit up behind), and to rewrite small functionalities of some libraries i want to avoid loading (which allowed us to remove legacy dependencies). It's good at writing prototypes (my main use nowadays), and a very good way to use it is to ask it a plan to improve/factorize your code (it's _very_ bad at factorizing, but as it recognize patterns, it is able to suggest interesting refactors. Half the time it's wrong, so use the "plan" mode)
I'm on a network security and cybersecurity tooling team, i guarantee you AI is shit at securing the code (and at understanding network).
I ran Opus on some public source code, and lets just say that the picture was less rosy for the whole "human as security".
I understand people have a aversion to LLMs but it irked me the wrong way to see the amount of downvotes on here, because people disagree with a opinion. Its starting the become like reddit. As i stated before, its still your tasks as the person working with the LLM to guide it on security practices. But as somebody now 30 years in the industry, the amount of absolute crap i have seen produced as code (and security issues), makes LLMs frankly security wizards.
Stupid example: I have yet to see LLMs not use placeholders to prevent SQL injection (despite it being trained on a lot of bad code).
The amount of code i have seen, where humans just injected variables directly into the SQL... Yea, what a surprise that SQL database content get stolen like its nothing. When doing a security audit on some public code, one of the items always found by the LLMs, yep ... SQL injectable code everywhere.
A lot of practices are easy, but anybody can overlook something in their own code base. This is where LLMs are so great. You audit with multiple LLMs and you will find points that are weak or where you forgot something, even if you code security wse.
So yea, i have no issue doing discussions but the ridiculous downvotes on what seems to come from people with no clue, is amazing. Going to take a break from here.
But like i said, this whole discussion on LLMs since Opus is out is _great_ for my ego. At first i thought i used it wrong, then my company made weekly meeting on "how to use AI" with devs who swore by it, now i'm confident I might be a bit above average after all.
Maybe it's different for tooling/network/security devs than for product devs, but i doubt our backend are _that_ complex.
To think that someone on Hacker News actually wrote this seriously in 2026, after a couple of decades of CVEs, security breaches, and data thefts being in the news every single week and after 50+ years of the industry experiencing how arduous software maintenance is. I doubt even Anthropic or OpenAI would be brave enough to say that.
Nobody gatekept anything. The software, tools, knowledgebase (MIT, Coursera, etc) were always there. It was a choice. Some of us chose it, rest didn't for whatever reason.
Who was preventing you from learning how to do it yourself and then doing it?
> the gatekeeping has now been removed
'Gatekeeping' being 'knowing'... nobody was stopping you from learning.
> The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.
Incredible joke. Got a good laugh from me.
Most of the problems you talk about are problems if you intend your software to be used at scale.
If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?
People used to do this in an Excel sheet.
Now they can ask Claude to make them a nice UI similar to MFP or whatever.
Data can be stored in a single JSON file.
It's going to take years before they see actual performance issues.
And even though it becomes an issue, right now an AI Agent can already provide a fix and a script to migrate the data.
My only concern really is about security.
But a private VPS only reachable through Tailscale and they're ahead of 99% of the rest.
AI can fix bugs, sure. But every time you ask it to fix the same problem, it will come up with a new solution - usually unnecessarily complex. Will we reach a point where the AI can be its own architect? Maybe. But, I know for a fact that it's not what we have right now.
Right now, AI needs an architect to tell it how it should solve a problem. The real value of software is in the lived human experiences, not just the code. That's why we make certain decisions different than an AI would.
Ask an AI to vibe code an invoice app. It will make some really lovely looking UI - which is what unfortunately people judge an app by - but with a MongoDb backend which is totally not the right solution for the problem. That's what I mean.
They don't, it's just annoying as shit when things break at the worst time for lack of these "best practices" and you know that the only answer will be "do better". I'll give you an example. Years ago I migrated a lot of my app usage to selfhosted OSS apps for all the reasons one might list them. I did like 80% of what I perceived as the "important best practices". Setup ZFS with redundancy to handle drive failures, a UPS for power interruption, wireguard for secure access, docker for application and dependencies isolation, etc.
But there were always things I just thought "I should probably do that, but later. This is just for me"
It would be the end of the day, I'm tired and on bed wanting to just chill and watch something on my ipad, and what do you know my plex is down, again.
Why does it go down every few days? Now I need to go get a laptop, ssh into my server, docker logs. See a bunch of exceptions. I don't want to debug it today. Just restart it, ok it works again. Go to bed, start watching.
20 minutes in.. I think it's down again.. wtf? get the laptop again, google the error, something about sqlite db on an NFS share not being very stable. All my ZFS storage is only exposed as NFS and SMB share to another machine.. Ok, just restart and hope it works and I'll deal with it latter.
Forget for a couple of days. I'm with a friend as her place and want to watch again, and fuck me I never fixed the sqlite issue, nevermind lets just watch netflix.
Over the weekend, I'm determined to get this fixed. Move the application folder out of NFS on the local machine SSD. It doesn't have redundancy, but it's ok for now. I'll setup an rsync job to copy it to the NFS share in case the SSD fails. I just want to see if it'll be stable.
Few months pass, and it's been pretty stable until I have a power outage. The UPS was there, but the configuration to notify the OS to shutdown broke a while ago and I didn't notice. Files on ZFS are fine, but the some on the local SSD got corrupted and I didn't notice, including plex database. the rsync job just copied the corrupted file over the "backup" file.
It's late at night again, and I just want to relax and watch something and discover this happened. I could try to figure out how to recover it, but it's probably easier to just do a clean scan. It's gonna take hours. Lets just start it and go to sleep.
Later, lets just migrate everything to jellyfin. Have auto upgrade setup because I'm smart. Jellyfin 10.8 updates and unfavorites all the facorited music tracks. "You have backups right". "Well, yes I do. Let me make sure I have an evening cleared so I can setup another instance of jellyfin, run the old backups, export the favorite list, and import it in the new one"... oh there is no way to do that? I guess I can export it to CSV, get a plugin to automate it for me. the plugin hasn't been updated to 10.8 but there is a pull request. ok lets wait. Forget that I setup restic to delete backups older than 30 days. fuck me. I have the CSV somewhere I think. God my `/tmp` is ephemeral and I hope I haven't rebooted since then. phew it's there. fuck me still.
I have worked in managing services for most of my career. I know what I'm doing wrong. I need to setup monitoring, alerts, health checks, 321 backups (not just rsync to a zfs pool) and actually use a backup software that tracks file versions, off site redundancy, dashboards for anomaly detection, scheduled hardware upgrades and checks for memtest, disk health, UPS configuration checks. I know how 3 or 4 9s are achieved in the industry.
Actually this number was updated to 135,000 exposed instances recently
Unless you had an AI write the article, you can't possibly know that. I'm sick of this being randomly thrown around: it's basically mentioned for every article posted. Sometimes the author chimes in to say that no, they wrote it themselves. Other times sure, the article was written by AI. I don't know, and you don't know either.
Easiest way, however - any article that uses em dashes instead of regular hyphens is most likely AI. Normal bloggers, particularly in casual tech circles don't use em dashes. When was the last time you ever used an em dash? Me? Never.
The use of the word "any" here only emphasizes that this advice is not very valuable.
Pray how do those "ai detectors" work? I trust those even less than I trust ai: AI detectors use simple heuristics and take advantage of your gullibility.
Personally, for my small business. I've replaced £500 Zapier subscription, £100 Todoist subscription, and I only haven't replaced the rest because I feel like there's not a huge rush. And it's been six months and nothing has fallen apart yet.
You might not think small business is relevant, but it absolutely is.
This is AI abundance for all and for free.
Also the end of the app store grifting.
I welcome this, having an app was never a competitive advantage at all.