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Comment by onetimeusename | Hacker News Reader

I have this theory that the economics of AI development would make it so it's much more viable to make in-house, custom, apps rather than paying subscriptions for apps. I have even seen this play out on a personal level. A friend of mine who has no dev experience vibe-coded something custom that evite does. So it's possible measuring the number of apps miscounts ones that are not public or shared. I'm not negating anything you said, just adding something about metrics on apps.

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At the 60 person smb (travel industry) I work we've taken web development in house for the first time, created new user experiences that sat on our roadmap for years, created custom AI solutions on top of our Fresh desk tooling, and (predictably) created a number of internal productivity tools.

The actual bottom line result is very fuzzy. Cost are shifting, by spending less on agencies but in return opening up new positions or shuffling people internally.

We don't see a clear increase in revenue, nor can we accurately tie retaining revenue to our AI initiatives.

Workplace satisfaction scores remain similar, with a few outliers (e.g. some people's work got incredibly exciting, while a few others are terrified by all the change).

Time will tell if this all leads to anything meaningful for the business.

i used to be in charge of these sorts of decisions for my team. the thing most people don't think about when it comes to rolling your own software is the upkeep. in other words, you don't _just_ pay for the software. you pay for someone to keep it running so you don't have to wake up at 2am to deal with angry customers.

Maybe one day but right now in order to get any meaningfully usable app with AIs you need to pay way more in AI sub than monthly sub of a bunch of apps. It doesn’t make sense right now to build especially your own if you’re not a company. Also it’s not clear how long we’ll have this heavily subsidized subscriptions.

This I can believe, also seen it on a personal level.

But I'm not sure about the long-term effects of this, we just shifted the "subscriptions for apps" to "subscription for an app" AND you must now maintain said apps.

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