15 ms·

Your app subscription is now my weekend project

• kylecazar 9mo ago
  Yeah. Part of why this is possible is simply that there are tons of subscription apps out there that were never really justified in requiring a recurring payment and are actually fairly trivial. It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that. I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.
  • mr_mitm 8mo ago
    What I fear is a pollution of the open source space with tons of tailored apps that have a lot of overlap, but none of them get meaningful contributions because the maintainer will most likely respond with wontfix to almost everything (if they respond at all).
    • theshrike79 8mo ago
      I build in the open, but what I build is just for me. If someone wants to fork it and modify it, they can go ahead - pretty much all of my stuff is MIT licensed by default. But I'm not going to start adding features to my bespoke utility to fix someone else's problem.
    • pixl97 8mo ago
      Shrug, it's hard to have an open app where everyone wants to add/change something and not have it turn into a Turing machine that attempts to do everything. Sometimes you just want an app does X and Y, but not A, B and Z.
  • TheGRS 8mo ago
    Was reminiscing about the early iOS App Store days when many apps were free and often hobby projects. Some hooked up google ads to make a nice easy profit if they stumbled on a particularly good early app idea. I don't really find apps like that anymore, or at least they don't really get shared the same way. Maybe this is a return to that in a sense. I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.
  • quesomaster9000 8mo ago
    The subscription craze is getting worse where often the features I need are locked behind a recurring fee costing hundreds to thousands of dollars over its useful lifetime, or are only available in 'enterprise' versions where the sales people laugh me off for not having $30k to spend and won't even let me trial the software (because inevitably I'll just RE it and make a crack) The most recent example is I wanted a simple home security system with presence detection and a private control panel, none of the free ones hit my requirements, or require custom hardware, or lock you into a cloud, or assume you can spin-up some containers - or are super enterprise grade stuff. Within about 2 days I had an android app for my tablet, Google FMDN integration, fingerprinting of my other devices, all controllable via Telegram from any of my phones with alerts that "just work" wherever I am and include an inline gif snapshot. What I wanted didn't really exist as any individual product, so I absolutely see the appeal of DIY vibe-coded stuff, and a day of the build time was optimizing the OpenGL motion-detection pipeline with shaders & DMA which in itself was good to learn about.
  • sevenseacat 8mo ago
    Most users expect everything to be cloud these days. In the cross-stitching community (which is mostly older non-technical folk), the amount of people that get mad every day because the most popular app is local-only, is phenomenal. What do you MEAN they smashed their device, bought a new one, and all their WIP projects aren't there anymore?
    • carlosjobim 8mo ago
      > Most users expect everything to be cloud these days. No way. Maybe most Linux users. MacOS, iOS, Android, and probably Windows users are all app-first.
      • sevenseacat 8mo ago
        App first, but using the cloud for storage and syncing.
• Bishonen88 8mo ago
  I made the same realization two weeks ago. Posted about it here, where I rebuilt bare bones todoist with a habit tracker, goal setting and more within a few vibe coding sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633092 I think that many existing apps with huge userbases will gradually lose users as the models become better and better. Their biggest advantage is that people don't like change, and thus having to e.g. export data from some tools etc. seems to be a hassle not worth $5 a month. But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate. On the other hand, new products will have a much harder time to gather a big userbase. Whenever I'll see a launch of a SaaS asking for $$$, the first question I'll ask myself will be how long it will take LLM to recreate it. And for most cases, I imagine that the time it will take to get 80% of what they have is a few vibe coding sessions (as most newcomers will probably have used LLM themselves to code it up).
  • Shank 8mo ago
    > But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate. I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to write software, even with LLMs, and use it in production. The average computer user does not even use a computer as their primary computing device, they use a phone. The barrier to going from idea to phone app on iPhone or Android is relatively high. Todo list apps, habit trackers, and the like are almost a special snowflake breed. Almost everyone has some different cross-section of needs they care about, and no app is perfect for each individual. So it's natural to say "is there something that matches what I want?" and then reach for tools to make that. The world is your oyster for todo list apps. Of course, the real issue comes from data sovereignty, trust, quality, things like that. When Apple launches a new device or a new iOS feature people want, you get to see which apps will actually implement the new features or which stagnate. They're a natural avenue for vibe coding since they're so particular.
• rvz 8mo ago
  Some apps just do not make any sense for monetization and are now raced to zero. If it's not already open sourced then someone will vibe-code an implementation if none exist. Vibe-coding accelerates the destruction of basic (closed-source) apps charging a subscription for features that offer little to no value whatsoever.
• Shank 8mo ago
  First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time. But for an app whose use case doesn’t change and is recurring for no reason? Yeah there’s probably not much value in recurring payments outside of wanting to support the developer. I pay a lot of indie devs out of the goodness of my heart, and I’ll continue to do that. But the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.
  • Bishonen88 8mo ago
    Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess. Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
    • Shank 8mo ago
      It is not irrational on the part of the developer -- I've definitely felt this too. The problem comes from the fact that practically everyone has subscription fatigue these days, and each of us probably has only a few pieces of software we truly care about enough to want to support them out of the goodness of our hearts. But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
      • throwup238 8mo ago
        > But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective. And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail - the two most important services that control my digital life - are each $60/year, that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. The ones that do are like NextDNS where they cost $20-30 per year because the people running them aren't greedy lemmings trying to pay back VC.
• risyachka 8mo ago
  Thats not cheaper than paying a subscription. In fact this is at least 3x-10x more expensive. And this is comparing to being subscribed many years in a row. With SaaS you can unsub and sub only when you need it again. With your side project - a weekend of your life is invested and you will never get it back. This is the worst use of your time if you measure it in $. If you make it for fun - sure. In all other terms it is a complete loss.
  • Bishonen88 8mo ago
    $20 claude code subscription for a month can replace the $15 + $10 for each month. How is that 3x more espensive? The user just saved $280 per year, on just two subscriptions alone. Hardly doubt that this was the 'most waste of ones time'. For one, it's not like most of us can decide to "work" for 3-5 hours on a Saturday and get any money. I play games on my pc while claude codes for me. I alt tab each few minutes and see if it needs any input. Then I can (not that I do it), read and perhaps learn from the code.
    • ctxc 8mo ago
      Hey, CC has a way to trigger a notification chime on completion. (How? Idk, I just asked it to guide me through the short hook process)
      • theshrike79 8mo ago
        Afaik it's built in now. I get a notification on macOS with the title of the context.
    • risyachka 8mo ago
      Yup. thats more expensive because each hour of your time is at least 50USD And each hour on weekend that you would have spent with your family etc is probably 500-1000 usd at least, so yeah, it is much cheaper to pay 15 usd for SaaS
• soulchild37 8mo ago
  And one day your day job will be someone else weekend project
  • philipwhiuk 8mo ago
    Only assuming a sufficient number of your customers is happy and capable to vibe-code a product for their set of the requirements that your product solves.
• mr_mitm 8mo ago
  The "Your" shouldn't have been stripped from the title IMHO.
  • philipwhiuk 8mo ago
    Depending on how you read the owner of an app subscription (the provider or the subscriber) maybe 'My' is better.
    • vagab0nd 8mo ago
      I believe it's a play on "Your margin is my opportunity".
• oliwary 8mo ago
  This is a fun article and approach. Subscription apps often have to target a wide userbase. However, most users only need a small subset of the entire feature set, and would be better served by a tailored version. This means that vibecoded apps can get away with being much less complex (specific featureset, no login etc), while still being more useful. I have also created tools with LLMs that are exactly tailored to what I need, and still much more polished than what I could do without LLMs. Will have to think about if there is anything else I can do this with.
  • theshrike79 8mo ago
    I had to download file attachments from a specific niche web forum that's behind login. I could've went looking for a browser plugin or a 3rd party tool to do it. Once again, it took me about an hour while watching my shows to get a custom one made. The first version operated by me downloading the pages one by one to a directory, the Python app parsed the html, downloaded the files and renamed according to thread name. After a few iterations the tool just grabs a cookies.txt file exported from Firefox and can take any thread URL, browse through it, skipping existing files and determining if everything is already downloaded I could easily have it just watch a set of threads for new content and download automatically, but the current system is fine =)
    • chasd00 8mo ago
      That’s pretty great, I’ve done something similar by hand many moons ago. It was very tedious. I need a simple S3 compatible API to store some files with basic auth and ssl certs using let’s encrypt. Nothing crazy, Garage is overkill, Minio is overkill. I may see if Claude code can handle that for me using python or something. /btw, I work in consulting and the above project would have a budget of probably $100k and a schedule of 3 months. I see a lot of change for swe consultants coming.
      • jppope 8mo ago
        As the saying goes: "for us to be replaceable, clients would need to know what they want and how to articulate it... we're safe"
• _def 8mo ago
  I get that this is tempting but it just means you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix. And disaster recovery is most certainly a manual task.
  • kioleanu 8mo ago
    If you build enough things, you will also gain the experience to fix those things
  • lawtalkinghuman 8mo ago
    > you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it. Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.
    • hahahahhaah 8mo ago
      Right but most of the time, in my experience they keep the lights on.
      • lawtalkinghuman 8mo ago
        Keeping the lights on is fine. But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back. If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it. If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this. If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this. Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.
        • pixl97 8mo ago
          Yep. At one point I expected the software I needed to work for a reasonable time range, possibly up to a decade. Best if you could buy it once and use it from then on. Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.
• d_sc 8mo ago
  Loved the article, thanks for sharing. I’m curious if you’d share your setup. I haven’t made any macOS apps before, primarily because I never wanted to really learn XCode and obj-c. I like swift but still prefer simpler editors like Zed/VSC vs. What XCode offers.. so when you’re building these are you doing it in XCode or in another tool like Claude Code/codex/gemini CLI? cheers
  • 3D30497420 8mo ago
    Not OP, but I use Xcode with Claude Pro and it is going fairly well. I also am creating my own personal-use apps instead of paying for monthly subscriptions. I know a bit of Swift, and had been trying to learn it while also using LLMs. At this point, I've decided to also not make these real projects and just vibe-code exactly what I want.
  • headcanon 8mo ago
    Seconded, I would be interested in knowing people's workflows + experiences developing MacOS and iOS apps with claude, etc. From the repo here, it looks like its just using swift command line tools, which might just work well enough with cursor/vscode/etc. for small projects. You won't have Xcode's other features but maybe thats fine for an agentic-first development workflow.
  • timc3 8mo ago
    I've been using Cursor with the Swift Extension. Works really nicely, but sometimes I switch to Xcode to do some tasks such as testing that it works to build.
• CurleighBraces 8mo ago
  It’s easy to overlook what I think is the real value of these “home-built” tools. We can now produce products and apps that are tailored to our own preferred ways of working. Regardless of the cost of generating them (which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription) or the effort involved (sometimes less than an hour of “vibe coding”), we’ve reached a point where the resulting product can be significantly more valuable than the existing product, service, or subscription it replaces.
  • xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
    > which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription That's way too much money. The opencode default models are free
• rukuu001 8mo ago
  > I’m still skeptical of vibecoding in general. As I mentioned above, I would not trust my vibecoding enough to make these into products. That’s the whole point - there’s no need for it to be a product when you can do it yourself, and it’s the death knell of products like this.
  • hahahahhaah 8mo ago
    Also you dont need the architecture to scale to millions of users. So it can be a bit more rough and OK to be inefficient.
    • theshrike79 8mo ago
      And you don't need to build in user management, Stripe integration for payments, build a landing page, advertise it or anything. You can just use it and be content.
      • slig 8mo ago
        >user management, Stripe integration for payments FWIW, `better-auth` solves that and LLMs know how to integrate it.
  • JKCalhoun 8mo ago
    "Death knell" is, I think, putting too fine a point on it. At the same time, Apple better wake up as the quality of the App Store (such as it is) is about to get much, much worse as a flood of vibe-coded apps make it onto the store. These will likely crap out in spectacular ways and, as I say, bring user's experience with the App Store in general way down. It's like when Amazon intermingled drop-ship sellers on their platform. (Oh well, not my problem.)
• mdrzn 8mo ago
  Which is exactly why whenever I have an idea I just tinked with ClaudeCode for an hour or so until I have exactly what I need. It takes less time than trying to compare 10 similar products, none of which have the exact specifications or features that I need. List of projects mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716805
• philipwhiuk 8mo ago
  I think there's still an underestimated burden to vibe-coding an app for a non-software engineer. I'm not recommending my parents vibe-code apps to solve problems, so I think the market is smaller. But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.
  • 3D30497420 8mo ago
    With the current tech, I agree this will still be pretty niche. I'm vibe-coding my own iOS apps, and it still needs a decent understanding of the tech and a willingness to put up with a lot of rough edges. However, with a proper framework (e.g., a very opinionated design system, the ability to choose from some pre-designed structures/flows, etc.) I could very much see ad hoc creation of software becoming more widespread.
  • theshrike79 8mo ago
    I'm currently assisting three very non-programmer people in-house who did just this. Their problem is solved, now it's up to me to update the internal guidelines and agent instructions so that the code is at least semi-decent. None of these are going to "production", they all live on local company controlled laptops and only one of them might access an external API automatically later this spring. But each of them takes hours of manual work and does it in minutes.
  • sandspar 8mo ago
    I assume the learning curve will get shallower over time. Onboarding is better than ever and will only improve. Lots of 70 and 80 year olds on Facebook now, and future Facebooks will verbally handhold you as you log on. "Press the red button that I just highlighted... great job!" etc.
• elashri 8mo ago
  > Then just yesterday, a friend of mine was telling me how he got tired of paying for Typora and decided to vibecode his own Markdown editor But typora is actually one time purchase and one of the rare apps that is priced well with good business model. They have probably best RTL support and I wanted like your friend to write my own focused markdown editor with RTL support using clause and made some progress but realized that the time and cost of doing this is not worth it. I just paid typora a week ago for $15. But I understand the point and I use Claude to hack together personal tools all the time.
  • CIARobotFish 8mo ago
    Yeah, I was confused by that as well. Typora is sold as a perpetual license for 3 devices at $15. I don't understand why their friend would be tired of paying for it.
• ribice 8mo ago
  I did this recently at the company I work at. Someone suggested GitBook, I 'Vibe coded' an internal docs website in under and hour. Does what we need, looks good. Unless the app has a large community/network and is just a SaaS with some offering, it'll be very easy to replace it.
  • zith 8mo ago
    It's interesting, because a few years ago I would have put this strictly under the "not invented here" fallacy, where we'd now be stuck maintaining another project for the foreseeable future. I used to press pretty hard to avoid it. Now I wonder if the maintenance cost for this type of internal system has gone down to a level where that is no longer an issue.
    • YmiYugy 8mo ago
      I can see it going both ways. If knowledge work continues to roughly look the way it looks then I think maintenance is going to be an issue. Both in terms of keeping the spaghetti together but also in terms of all the bad design decisions you get from everyone bolting on their ideas. If however knowledge work becomes just talking to LLMs and occasionally interacting with an on the fly generated UI then maintenance becomes a non issue
  • theshrike79 8mo ago
    We're currently paying through the nose for a shitty intranet solution that could've been just hugo with a markdown editor. Or a vibe-coded simple website. But "designed and implemented company-wide intranet" looks good in someone's CV so here we are.
• lewantmontreal 8mo ago
  I should vibecode my own Onshape.
• 3D30497420 8mo ago
  I'm doing something very similar (creating my own apps for personal use), but I'm creating iOS apps primarily. Here's what bugs me: I cannot permanently install my apps to my iPhone because of Apple's walled garden. I need to reinstall every 7 days and constantly re-confirm that I am a "Trusted" developer. I know I can pay Apple 100 USD a year for a developer account, but I bought this phone outright 7 years ago, I own it. (Obviously, I clearly don't in this case.) /rant
  • theshrike79 8mo ago
    Are you using features that can't be replicated with a PWA?
    • 3D30497420 8mo ago
      I actually created a PWA first, but it was just even more rough around the edges than the vibe-coded iOS app. I wanted something that felt like an app, so would use iOS design elements, have widgets, use on-device storage (for offline use), etc. Apple, very intentionally I believe, makes a lot of these things harder than they need to be.
  • beoberha 8mo ago
    I had never written an iOS app until a couple months ago and was initially very put off when I hit the same wall. The alternative is to host on a cheap VPS and find some way to prevent other people from using your app. When you cost it out, it's close enough to the 100 bucks a year for the Apple account. However, the kicker for me is the side loading process. Way too much headache compared to a deploy script that has my changes running nearly instantly.
  • zem 8mo ago
    this is the primary reason i've never even considered buying an iphone.
• phyzix5761 8mo ago
  Has anyone tried, on a large scale, designing the architecture of an application or writing behavioral tests (which effectively is designing the app through testing) and given the LLM the task of writing the implementation details? Does that work better for maintainability than letting it decide on its own what the architecture should look like? If so, what is your setup/workflow?
• jackfranklyn 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • 3D30497420 8mo ago
    I doubt LLM-generated software is going to replace more traditional software any time soon, especially when accuracy is pretty important (such as accounting). One thing I learned from years as a PM in a very data-centric organization is understanding data, how it is generated/stored/cut/etc. is very important to getting accurate results. Where I could see some really interesting results is the marriage of the two. For example, you have a solid data structure that an LLM can generate infinite custom views from.
    • theshrike79 8mo ago
      https://www.databricks.com https://www.databricks.com is doing this already with data as well as multiple other companies And I have first hand knowledge of well-known companies building their own tooling because the SaaS offerings have a bad price/feature ratio.
    • duckydude20 8mo ago
      i think the same, i think backend where data is more prominent is not going anywhere soon. llms produce very bad data structures. but from good apis, good data, good interface they can generate quite nice frontends. i guess, frontend as job is going to have a hard time. also, writing code is not cognitive load, its always reading code. and llms just increase that. so i mostly try to avoid using them. but i do like researching with them. context free. like googles ai mode, etc. not from my code editor cause then they get biased and suggest stupid sh8t all the time.
  • theshrike79 8mo ago
    You can pivot your knowledge into building bespoke tools for the same people, just a LOT faster. The recommendation thing is a nice benchmark, but if you're building hyper-specific tools - why would people recommend them to anyone? If you build a tool for an accountant that does some very niche thing only they're bothered by, why would they recommend to the analyst or receptionist in the company?
• rednafi 8mo ago
  The SaaS business model took things too far anyway. Everything is a subscription and it gets tiring quickly. I am glad that LLMs can replace crappy SaaS with crappy code now. I replaced a whole bunch of these with one shot prompts for shits and giggles.
• ChildOfChaos 8mo ago
  This is the same for me and I've not written code for years since I was a kid in school. I vibe coded a webapp that I was paying yearly for and the version I made does everything I wish the app I paid for did as it's 100% personalised to me. I've been thinking for awhile that this is going to be the future and I'm already starting to think of more things I will create.
  • altmanaltman 8mo ago
    can you share which paid webapp you were using and maybe a link to your version's github?
    • ChildOfChaos 8mo ago
      The App was TeuxDeux. I haven't published it publicly yet, as i use it personally and it's a little flakey still, but will look to do in the future once I finish adding all the features. My version is much more feature rich than TeuxDeux and I made it for Free in Google AI studio over the past two months, between other things. I'd just type a prompt and then go do some other stuff, it has taken quite a lot of revision but I haven't written a single line of code and i've been using it daily to manage my tasks since the start of December.
• 3rodents 8mo ago
  Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year. Would we have Claude Code if our foredevelopers hadn’t spent thousands of hours deep in thought, obsessing over every last detail? Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world. I have no philosophical objection to vibe-coding apps for yourself, but personally, I wouldn’t be 1/10th of the engineer I am if I wasn’t constantly exposed to the work of others. For some, this trend worries software engineers — who needs software if they can vibe code it themselves? — but I am much more optimistic. I think people will start valuing good software a lot more. Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.
  • sjw987 8mo ago
    Making your own software is a good way to escape enshittification and influence. I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour. Most apps are very simple and there isn't too much to learn, especially if you're building it to scale to a userbase of yourself. I can't see the need for a ton of CRUD apps which demand subscription fees personally. If you build them yourself, you get to keep your own data, build it out the way you want it, keep it that way, and use computers as a person using a tool as opposed to a customer buying a product.
    • figers 8mo ago
      I did MP3s on my plex server for a while but with endless new music added to my playlists it became a hassle and Apple Music was just convenient and Shazam adding any song I hear and like is just too easy...it also plays perfectly on my Apple Watch over cellular when I go for a run, but everyone has their own use case and where they want to spend their time...
• sim04ful 8mo ago
  The prevalence of this "personal vibecoded app" spirit makes me start to wonder if an "App" is the right level of abstraction for packaging capabilities. Perhaps we need something more "granular".
  • sandspar 8mo ago
    Personally I hope we land on "widget" although I'd settle for "thingamabob"
• LuckyBuddy 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• yilugurlu 8mo ago
  I see the sceptical comments, but no one says this "vibe-coded" projects/apps/tools will be ready for your customers. It basically scratches the itch for the given users/company/whatever. Also, it doesn't have to be fast, stable or handle 1_000_000 concurrent users. You don't have to worry about that. Not everything has to be a SaaS, but I don't think all SaaS apps can be vibe-coded to a weekend project. If it is solving my issues and problems, why do preaching about the merits of a proper product or paying. I'll pay for what I see value in, and vibe-code where I don't see the benefit of paying. Maybe I miserably fail and get back to paying to product. It's all good, I take that responsibility while I start my vibe-coding session.
• theturtletalks 8mo ago
  Turning a paid sub like WisprFlow into your own weekend build (Jabber) is a great move, but you can take it further by finding open-source alternatives that already implement the features you're replicating. For dictation and speech-to-text like what WisprFlow does, there's Handy[0], a free, open-source, offline speech-to-text app that runs locally with Whisper models. Once you identify something like Handy, instruct Claude to study how that OSS project actually builds the feature and adapt the logic to your stack. AI is really good at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and understanding the full implementation. The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces and don't capture everything otherwise. That's what I'm working on at opensource.builders[1]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook of features you can remix across stacks, with structured "skills" that point to the exact details so the porting works reliably. [0] https://github.com/cjpais/Handy https://github.com/cjpais/Handy [1] https://github.com/junaid33/opensource.builders https://github.com/junaid33/opensource.builders
  • altmanaltman 8mo ago
    So basically steal code from OSS, oh no I meant "get inspired by" OSS code without actually contributing anything. This is just gross as a developer imo.
    • theturtletalks 8mo ago
      We're big believers in personal software: even with OSS alts existing, building your own in your stack is valuable. Before AI, you'd read code from other apps, understand the implementation, and reimplement it yourself. This just makes that easier and faster. My projects (Openship/Openfront[0]) are the first on the chopping block. We're creating modular OSS alts for every vertical (barbershops, hotels, etc.) for folks to take, remix, adapt, or fork into their tools. Chances are your AI model is already trained on similar OSS and building from it anyway. We make finding the exact code reliable. Check out our ethos to learn more [1]. [0] https://openship.org https://openship.org [1] https://opensource.builders/ethos https://opensource.builders/ethos
    • 8mo ago
• jalict 8mo ago
  This reminds me so much of Maggie Appleton blog post on "Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers" [1] We have so many people who are so excellent and fast and developing nowadays that we can even afford the time to build things for our community, friends and even just for ourselves. It has probably always been like this, but I am just personally observing a higher-degree of people doing and talking about it. Even just the small-web/neocities bobble points into this. [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
• spaceman_2020 8mo ago
  This is where claude code is so good because all the stuff AI is bad at - security, auth, storage - are not a problem if its just you using it locally
• robotsquidward 8mo ago
  Just sucks that instead of buying a piece of software now we're going to send $100/mo to an AI giant so we can build our own crappier bespoke apps.
  • xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
    I agree that spending money on claude code is stupid. But the default opencode models are free. I used one last night to replace the ad-filled alarm clock android app I use with a 90% ai written one.
    • JKCalhoun 8mo ago
      Yeah, I've vibe coded a few apps using just the free tier. Running out of "Pro" tokens just means, "Time to set the coding aside for today and get a few other things done around the house."
• neomantra 8mo ago
  I've been evangelizing vibe coding, because we are wielding something much more powerful now than even ~3 months prior (Nov was the turning point). Now that Prometheus (the myth, not the o11y tool) has dropped these LLMs on us, I've been using this thought experiment to consider the multi-layered implications: In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food?
  • eddguzzo 8mo ago
    >In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food? I would guess for convenience and saving time. While vibe-coding might be faster, you still have to "do it". As in, think about what you want your software to do, write out or dictate your prompts, test that it works etc. That takes time (might be less time than writing it out by hand but it's still a non-zero amount of time).
    • neomantra 8mo ago
      I think my comment was misconstrued as siding either way. I didn't communicate it well. It's that it frames questions -- like you were exploring. Because of course we all buy prepared foods of all sorts from street vendors to fast food to local restaurants to chains to Michelin Stars. While there are many reasons one will cook for themselves, there are many reasons one will buy from someone else too.
• TyrunDemeg101 8mo ago
  I am finding the same thing! I used to use a window management tool long ago called something like Zooom (it lets you press hotkeys and it 'picks up' your window and you can easily move it around). I fell in love with it like 20 years ago, but it was barely maintained. Someone then created a similar app called Hummingbird - which was great, but it had some issues and again maintainability wasn't great. So I decided to vibecode an app for myself and wouldn't you know? It took me a few hours and it's INCREDIBLE! No more relying on someone else to maintain something, I can simply build my own solutions, whenever I want!
• falloutx 8mo ago
  So if you can get a good LLM model locally in say 6 months, you may never pay for any subscriptions. Only companies will remain will be old behemoths whose software is contractually bought by other big enterprises. Other thing I have experienced is my standards have changed a lot, now for $10 subscription I need a lot more, not just some simple editor or a small todolist would suffice anymore. I am not thinking about paying for new software, and in fact I am getting completely burnt out by all the sites looking the same.
• demorro 8mo ago
  I'm surprised people were paying for software like this, and with subscriptions no less.
  • kixiQu 8mo ago
    Yeah, a little bespoke editor is exactly the kind of thing I'd've been happy to fork over a one-time cost for, but never a subscription. Interesting!
    • falloutx 8mo ago
      why even pay for that, just use a free model from Opencode, most of them are pretty good for simple tasks. I haven't paid a cent in vibe coding for ages.
  • magarnicle 8mo ago
    Yes, the options presented were overpay for something or roll your own. Could you not try to find a better alternative first?
• kevinsync 8mo ago
  I keep seeing versions of this soliloquy on here, sometimes multiple times every day. They make fine blog posts, it's something to say and something to read, but ultimately remind me more of piling into a Tiktok trend than anything else: everybody's doing it, so I will too! End of the day, much like when photography went digital (and smartphones got good cameras), yes, there were a LOT more photos taken, but the relative proportion of outsized, lauded photographers remained fairly constant. The upshot is that WAY more people are exposed to the possibility of creating excellence than before, the downside is the market gets flooded with utility and mediocrity. Said excellence never goes away, and the same will apply to software. The very idea that SaaS (or packaged software, or whatever) "will die" because "anybody" can prompt their way to a "personal tool" (as a mainstream exercise) is so far-fetched to me because the only people who will prompt their way to a tool ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS! Professionals who need functionality will always pay for it. Boomer dads who can barely work a DVR will always pay for it. Business owners who need less friction and more reliability will always pay for it. IMO, this "I'll just replace Salesforce with my own personal CRM for $200 for a month of Claude" thing is just a hobbyist's pipe dream lol -- not that there's anything wrong with it, some people will do it, but, man, there's a reason that Netflix is Netflix, and Plex isn't Netflix.
  • NuclearPM 8mo ago
    Most small businesses don’t need the complexity of Salesforce and people use Netflix for the content, not the software. I don’t understand why Netflix needs 3500 engineers. They built what needed to be built already.
• heliumtera 8mo ago
  By the same logic it was one git clone away.
• jrm4 8mo ago
  Good. Good good good. More of this. I feel like if e.g. Hypercard had lived, this would be a more defacto mode of doing things.
• throw0129 8mo ago
  I must admit that I find this thread very funny. "Spend $200 a month so that you can waste a weekend to make a shitty clone of a SaaS app so that you can save $10" is... somewhat questionable, as far as sensible decisions go. Some people even seem to assume that this is a death kneel of the entire saas app industru, since everybody can just vibe code an inferior knockoff of bejeweled or whatever. It just boggles he mind how divorced from reality some people are. You could offer $fotm_ai_model with infinite usage, free apple developer account (since you're apparently replacing everything you have with homegrown stuff) and the amount of people wasting their weekends on vibe-cloning their own custom apps would still approximate to zero. This doesn't even get to the fact that the majority of apps already HAVE a free alternative, and it's certainly far less effort to replace increasingly obnoxious apple music with foobar than to build, test and then permanently support your own music player. You also probably want claude code 15 to replace anything non-trivial, otherwise, well, good luck. I don’t think I’d bother even if my weekend had ten times as many hours as it does, and I’m a code monkey that still mostly enjoys his job.
• jakub_g 8mo ago
  The people who pay for the apps vs people vibecode them are largely a different demographic. Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.
  • Aperocky 8mo ago
    Linux is free, but it doesn't come bundled with hardware that might not work with it.
  • robofanatic 8mo ago
    Exactly! It’s like I saw you selling pre-cut fruit for $7 so I decided to cut my own fruit every week.
    • Spivak 8mo ago
      I think the difference is I was buying pre-cut fruit for $7 every week so I spent two days and now my fruit magically cuts itself forever. He turned an ongoing expense into a one time expense. And bonus he likely had fun doing the labor.
      • daliusd 8mo ago
        In some cases, that’s true, but sometimes you need to update cutting rules because of law changes, or you saw different way of cutting for example. There are cases where this is not one time investment. What I agree with that cutting-it-yourself became significantly cheaper
      • ncruces 8mo ago
        It's more like he was renting a knife to cut fruit for some reason and now, and instead of just buying a knife, he built one from scratch. (1) Let's hope he doesn't cut himself if the knife breaks apart while in use. (2) Why is it so hard to just buy knives these days? Why does every knife maker suddenly feel entitled to charge rent? I'm all for DIY instead of hiring others, but the insanity here is the rent vs. buy thing going on in the industry.
  • 8mo ago
• seemaze 8mo ago
  Lower the barrier to MVP while raising the bar on the level of quality that warrants MRR. Rising tides and all.. I can hire a contractor to build a carport, or whack one together with some supplies from the Big Box store. More roofs being built with more price points to serve the market.
  • cvhc 8mo ago
    I agree with your point on surviving the market, but I also suspect vibe coding give rise to lemon [1] projects that only intend to get quick money and don't care about recurring revenue. My wife was preparing for a specific exam and found an AI-powered mock exam app. The trial version was polished, but after she paid for full access she realized most contents are of low quality and some basic functionalities are broken. I imagine with LLM one might easily create such lemon products in infinite niche markets even without much domain knowledge, scam out some money from new users, and care not about survival. [1] As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile)
• quest88 8mo ago
  Excellent! I've done the same thing. Five prompts to have a working iOS app that solves my problem.
  • ThatMedicIsASpy 8mo ago
    As a non iOS user wouldn't be the hard part getting it on the phone? The last time I checked you would still need apple hardware and 100$ per year for the developer license or something like that.
    • gbear605 8mo ago
      Technically you can upload it to your phone for free, but you have to re-upload it every seven days, which makes it pretty frustrating.
• egonschiele 8mo ago
  I've been using a Wispr equivalent I made myself since 2023. It's wild to me that people pay for it, and I've wondered if I should try to monetize what I use. It is not as slick and polished, but provides essentially the same service: better speech-to-text than the built-in speech-to-text for Macs.
• ed_mercer 8mo ago
  > I would never sell it as a product I wonder why people still hold a lot of stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM.
  • mcgrath_sh 8mo ago
    I don't think it is "a stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM." I think the author is coming at it in the same way I do with some similar tools: "this is good enough for me, I am the end user, and I don't have the time or desire to iron out a bunch of edge cases or make things for more than one user." I am rewriting my website. I was using a converted Pelican template. I started the rewrite using variables similar to the template, then about halfway through, I realized, "this is dumb. I am the only user. I care about nobody else. I can hardcode nearly all of this, and if I want a change, change the hardcoded name." An example of this was various social media names. I have scripts that convert color themes for applications from more popular themes to a theme I particularly like. I hard-coded the input colors and output colors. I could have made a config file, etc, but, that adds complexity and, more importantly *I do not care about other users.* There is a huge leap between "good enough for me to use for exactly my use case" and release or sell as a product.
• pixelbyindex 8mo ago
  I was hoping that the current LLM/Agent/Vibecoding wave would lead to a revival of open source contributions, but I am not sure that is happening yet
  • linsomniac 8mo ago
    I think it's happening, some of them are even making it to the front page of HN, like the "I built 50 calculators" a few days ago. I'm still working to release some of the things I've built over the last month: - A nice little single-file web "random slideshow" to replace an aging one I bought. - A fairly feature-complete read-only SQL console. - A development SMTP server (like Mailhog) https://github.com/linsomniac/smtphotel https://github.com/linsomniac/smtphotel - A work status dashboard that I'll probably release once I have run it a bit longer. - A fairly extensive Docusign-like webapp. - A retrospective meeting runner. - A cron "swiss army knife" helper. - A "social calorie tracker" (I'm unhappy with the existing ones out there). These are all things I've vibecoded in the last month, and are more than I could have coded in my spare time in 6 months or more. For me, the renaissance is here.
  • 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
    The incentive for sending in patches was that you needed to fix a bug in software you were using for your own use case, so you might as well send the authors the patch, and they'd keep maintaining it all for you. But if you can vibe-code your own solution, you don't need to use somebody else's software, so the patch doesn't get made, much less submitted. The other thing is, LLMs tend to generate terrible code that pisses off open-source maintainers. So I'm not sure even LLM-made patches will make it into open source much. This might be the death of traditional open source. Vibe-coded-only open source may be the next generation. Which I'm fine with, as long as we can start regulating software, so that vibe-coded tools are banned for safety/privacy uses unless they follow a software building code.
• AstroBen 8mo ago
  Whats the future of being able to make money selling software with these changes?
  • dolebirchwood 8mo ago
    Target undeserved businesses with niche problems that have traditionally been ignored by tech companies because those markets have always been considered "too small" to be worthwhile.
• SLWW 8mo ago
  I read the same tired opposing arguments all the time; I thought of it the moment I read the title. "My time isn't free, so I'll pay the tax" is true, however most of these individuals spend hours a day watching the news or doing anything else but being productive or spending time with family/friends. If you aren't working 24/7 while handling a family and telling yourself your time is worth more than a small fee, you are just being lazy. I'm the same way, I am incredibly lazy and will constantly tell myself that my time is worth more. This is usually until I realize I'm spending way to much of my "money" to "save time". HourlyWage(time) = money, if I'm saving time by spending money I'm losing time. This is a basic concept and I defy anyone to show me otherwise. We live in a time where instant gratification is the main driver behind most decisions, devaluing our currency each and every fee we succumb to... as money is time, and if time is being "saved" by spending time (in the form of money) we are now applying a future debt to the work we are doing today. You might work 40 hours one week, where at least 4 hours of that week goes to paying your streaming bill, another 8 for Internet and Phone, as well as another 2 for the coffee you didn't make that week, another hour for your notetaking app on your phone, 30 minutes for your subscription to watch funny youtuber release content early, another 2 hours for you glut of productivity apps, etc. These things all work to keep you a wage-slave till the day you eventually croak with a menial 401k. It's embarrassing we reduce ourselves to this.
  • zemvpferreira 8mo ago
    Get a better hourly wage. About an hour of my month pays for all of my entertainment and software subscriptions. Another couple of hours pay for a year of iPhone. Coffee? Another hour per month maybe? We are worlds apart in our arithmetic and I don't even earn that much. If people enjoy spending their unpaid hours building clones of paid software that's fine, but it's fine because they enjoy it. It's not minimally worth it. The time I waste on YouTube and the news etc etc is sorely needed and enjoyed downtime. If someone has enough energy to build instead of vegetating, more power to them. I prefer to save my energy for the stuff I value. (Which is actual work, helping family and games) EDIT: another thing to consider is that each hour I spend fully pursuing my occupation pays me an hourly wage but also pays me in career growth. This compounds massively over time in higher and higher wages. Building throwaway apps generally does not. Why would I waste energy on work that doesn't compound? I'm all for serendipity but not as a financial argument.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• ffitch 8mo ago
  Building (or vibecoding) a markdown editor for a single user and their specific use case, for a 100 users, and for 10,000 users takes different amount of time and effort. In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of users. Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good at the first glance but get abandoned before they achieve even a 100-users maturity level.
  • gdilla 8mo ago
    i mean, sure. but the point is, you yourself are often a solo user of these little productivity apps. if you're not using team-based features then a lot of these things aren't worth paying for.
    • ffitch 8mo ago
      I didn’t mean collaboration features. I clumsily used 10,000-users as a measure of the app completeness.
      • theultdev 8mo ago
        "10k user completeness" might be full of "features" you don't want that clutter the ui and add entropy. You know how you think and know your goals so a customized, focused solution would be better than something for the general masses.
        • albedoa 8mo ago
          Where did you run off to little boy?
          • theultdev 8mo ago
            Lol did you really come back to my profile 22 days after replying to me on a political thread? Did I hit a nerve or do you just have a crush on me? :)
• skybrian 8mo ago
  For me it makes sense because coding agents have made software development fun again, so I do more of that than playing games or surfing the Internet.
• dasil003 8mo ago
  Software itself is not inherently valuable, the value is in running and maintaining its data and any necessary integrations to other systems. The bar for me to pay for a $10/month software subscription is pretty high, but once I make the decision that it's valuable, the actual cash cost is pretty low. Vibe coding something will never approach the quality of something that someone put enough thought and effort to turn into a product. The main place where I'll write my own software is when it's truly custom to my own needs, AI is a force multiplier for this type of work, but at the end of the day I still have very limited time to run and maintain a lot of custom software and data, so it's not going to cannibalize any of the SaaS I'm willing to pay for. Obviously for younger software guys with more time than money, the equation will be different, but those were never the make-or-break demographic for SaaS anyway. I don't think the equation has meaningfully changed for SaaS sales due to AI, I see it more as continuously rising bar over the last two decades due to UX expectations, market saturation, limits on human attention and complexity tolerance.
• rambambram 8mo ago
  The vibe-coding part is most in discussion here, so it's easy to overlook the financial part. I build small web applications for my personal needs all the time by just regular programming, and I'm saving so much money by using them and not some proprietary app. Not even mentioning the advantages that it is completely bespoke, runs local and gives me peace of mind data-wise. Some wise man once said that personal computers are a bicycle for the mind. Programming your own programs is the most pure way you train on that bicycle.
  • LandenLove 8mo ago
    I think it depends on the project size and how much your time is worth. Vibe coding might be able to save some time, depending on how well it can solve the problem without needing correction.
• deepsun 8mo ago
  There's only 50 weekends in a year. And there's a limited amount of years. I'd rather pay $10 and spend the weekend sailing.
  • dylan604 8mo ago
    > There's only 50 weekends in a year. That's sad for you. Do you spend the other two weekends dead for tax purposes?
• zahlman 8mo ago
  > And then on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, I vibecoded Jabber. Might have a bit of difficulty naming it that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org). Edit: I apparently wasn't at all the first to think of this (https://github.com/rselbach/jabber/issues/5 https://github.com/rselbach/jabber/issues/5).
  • svelle 8mo ago
    My first thought as well, there is (or was) also Cisco Jabber which I wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole. It's generally a good idea to Google the name of the software you're about to publish online at least once.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• s09dfhks 8mo ago
  what is reel doing for osx that quicktime screen recording isnt getting you?
• piskov 8mo ago
  > Reel does exactly what I wanted Loom to do: I can record my camera, I can move it around, and I get to trim the video after it’s done (I don’t remember being able to do that with Loom). But that’s not what Loom is about. It’s about streaming the video. Before: Capture something with likes of quicktime. Transcode it so that it doesn’t take a few gigabytes. This takes considerable time and resources (though OBS can do it while recording, not after). Upload somewhere to share. Wait while it is uploading. Loom takes care of all those steps so when you press stop you can immediately share the link with someone. — Hope other use-cases in the article are not as misrepresented as this one
  • JusticeJuice 8mo ago
    Loom does also have a trim and edit after recording feature, I use it all the time
    • presentation 8mo ago
      As well as auto closed captioning, and commenting, and automatically cutting out filler words and empty silent portions, and auto summarization of the contents, and many other features that I use all the time and find useful. But that’s fine, OP probably just doesn’t use that stuff.
    • edu 8mo ago
      The also have a nice trimming feature where you can trim the video by editing the transcript
  • 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago
    I think author has a point when he didn’t needed all those extra features. But then they did made a bad choice for paying for loom. They could have just learned (or used llm) to make a bash script to use ffmpeg for capturing screen to a file. Or OBS is a pretty good solution as well. And a ton others
• idopmstuff 8mo ago
  I own a number of brands that sell on Amazon, and I've always used an app called HighFive that automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you bought (without it you have to click a button on each order to send it). It's always been free, but because of a change to the way Amazon charges third party app devs, they were going to start charging next month. Since the whole app is just a couple of API calls and storing a record of which orders you've sent the request to already, Claude Code built it in 5 minutes. In general, the Amazon Seller UI is a cluster (especially since I have one account for each brand, so I constantly have to switch between them). There are lots of subscription apps to make your Amazon data more useful and accessible, but Claude Code with access to the Amazon APIs pretty much replaces all of them. I spend very little time in the actual Amazon UI now and mostly just ask my trusty assistant for the info that I need.
  • dmitrygr 8mo ago
    > automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you Just FYI, most of us maintain blacklists of sellers who do that and would never give business to one again, even if it requires paying more. If I bought something from you, that is not permission to email me anything other than a tracking number. Ever. If i like it -- i'll review it mysef. If i dislike it -- i'll email you. Note the direction of comms here. Making you click a button per-order was perhaps Amazon's way to add friction to this -- to avoid poor users being spammed with endless review requests. I am sad that someone automated the friction away. I hope that one day amazon starts charging sellers a nontrivial fee per such email sent.
• koinedad 8mo ago
  I’ve been doing something similar and thinking about this in the last 6 months or so. It’s pretty crazy.
• rbbydotdev 8mo ago
  As a rebuttal to “SaaS is still cheaper!” - I like this because it makes coding more of a personal and enjoyable hobby. It also is empowering to the creator and gives them ownership of their creations and what their creations create
• jelmersnoeck 8mo ago
  I like this approach, at least for personal apps. I have started doing this myself, which also led into me learning to use LLMs better and more productively. The other side of the coin however is a potential decline in indie hacker products.
• 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
  > I’m often asked to make small videos showing some support agent how something works Fwiw, Google has had a free in-browser tool for this for ages, makes capture really simple on any device with a browser: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/ https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/
  • agotterer 8mo ago
    Zapier also has a free product which works well - https://zapier.com/zappy https://zapier.com/zappy
• Uptrenda 8mo ago
  So tired of these posts about people jerking themselves off over how good they are because they used AI to shit out some trivial bullshit. Like, I'm glad you're saving time and money. That's what AI now does. It's what millions of other engineers here --already know--. But why do we have to know about it? Is it remotely noteworthy or unexpected? Why does HN continue to upvote this self-serving, gratuitous, bullshit? Do you guys want HN to look like OP for the next [however long] this AI hype cycle takes to reach saturation (probably another 5 years at this point.) Even the biggest AI soyboy will be sick of it by then.
• bryanhogan 8mo ago
  If you were using Loom for just recording, please use OBS instead! Creating tools for your own workflows has become amazing, especially as a creator of anything it feels overwhelming with how many options there are now.
  • bryanhogan 8mo ago
    A few of the tool choices in the article seemed uninformed though, e.g. for markdown editing you have perfectly functional (and open!) tools that are free and powerful with good UX.
• guluarte 8mo ago
  This is great until it becomes a maintenance nightmare, some people don't mind paying as long as the software always works as expected and is high quality.
• abdulhak 8mo ago
  it's really cool now using your technical skills and with the help of AI to build these project, i do it all the time but for a reason, it can be a good project to add to a resume or you need it to work the way you want it to be, or to cut costs in certain situations, i mainly do that to cut costs. but it's really not free, nothing is free, It may not have cost you anything in terms of money, but it definitely cost you ur time, which in my opinion is way more valuable than a $10 subscription.
• zoeey 8mo ago
  [dead]
• vivzkestrel 8mo ago
  "Reel does exactly what I wanted Loom to do: I can record my camera, I can move it around, and I get to trim the video after it’s done" - tell me you haven't heard of OBS studio without telling me you haven't heard of OBS studio. But on a serious note OP, you should really give OBS studio a shot, it is one of the best video recording tools out there, period!
• m3kw9 8mo ago
  You shouldn't pay for most software unless it's stuff like Maya, excel. Paying for a markdown editor is just like paying for an egg slicer.
• csomar 8mo ago
  Most (all?) of these examples are products where the product is the UX not the functionality. macOS has dictation, there are free screen recording apps and you can use a normal text editor for your blog. There is no need to create a half-assed software that you don't understand and might break unpredictably at some point when there are free alternatives; and even open source ones you can download today. The interesting question is why the OP had bought these subscriptions in the first place if he was happy with less-polished alternatives.
• gabriel-uribe 8mo ago
  I'm very bullish on vibe coding generally, but I dont expect this will become a trend. Most people don't make or maintain their own things, period. Vibe coding will mostly cannibalize expensive B2B contracts from a pre-LLM era where integrations and maintenance were expensive.
  • matusp 8mo ago
    I think it's a question of how polished the process is. Imagine a new fully functional app popping up in your phone after a single prompt. Then, imagine you can edit this app while you are using it by saying what you wish it should do. There might be a lot of people interested in all kinds of small apps for their particular hobbies, interests, jobs, etc
• tuananh 8mo ago
  it doesn't have to be free. it can just be a lot cheaper or open source.
• svenmalvik 8mo ago
  I made Vissper which is essentially the same. Have a look, it's open source svenmalvik/vissper-oss on GitHub.
• rhubarbtree 8mo ago
  You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development. This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for. Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of static code. Code is a part of them, but it’s actually a minority of the work and the service. It’s very common to see founders fall out because CTOs believe product and company = tech and CEOs do not. If you’re a technical founder, learning this lesson will separate you from the pack.
  • whatever1 8mo ago
    “You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development.” Intuit does just that and charges north of $100 per month.
  • PunchyHamster 8mo ago
    You over-estimate quality of most SaaS products
  • pu_pe 8mo ago
    Insecure? What do you think is more secure, trusting a third-party SaaS with your data or processing it on your own server?
    • rhubarbtree 8mo ago
      Which is more secure, a GCP instance or you managing your own infrastructure?
      • pu_pe 8mo ago
        Remember that TFA is talking about personal tools that run on his own computer, so definitely his own infrastructure is more secure. Right now in Europe, GCP (like any other American cloud provider) is a big no-go as well, so I'm not sure even in professional settings the comparison holds.
• CalRobert 8mo ago
  For all the naysaying I wanted something that was “like languagereactor and anki put together” a few days ago and had it done in about two hours. And it runs on-device, because much of the time the whole reason for a cloud is to justify the subscription. And I can just install an apk (for now, I guess Google wants to steal that from us).
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• th2o34i32p43k2j 8mo ago
  Reminds me of the dream of the Lisp-o-sphere : where anything and everything (and its source) is at your fingertips and editable at your whim (this is what RMS wanted to do with GNU). There's also a story about Emacs at Amazon, where secretaries would code up elaborate things to automate their stuff. It tells you how silly our world is : we're happy with shitty uninteractive systems, languages and OSs, only so that we can fix it with the next version of "genius" AI systems which can barely do anything more than remove pain of dealing with the insane bloat.
• nkrisc 8mo ago
  I don’t think this will be a significant issue because I’m willing to bet the vast majority of people would rather spend their weekend doing something else.
• wt__ 8mo ago
  Never mind "vibecoding" (whatever it is) - quite a few free, paid or subscription apps can actually be improved for your own purposes by recreating them in a spreadsheet.
• dghf 8mo ago
  Are many people really paying dozens of dollars a month for things like Markdown editors?
  • JKCalhoun 8mo ago
    Markdown editors specifically? I think the general idea is people are paying dozens of dollars a month for all kinds of crap that used to be one-time purchase. And some people, fed up, are pushing back.
• charlie0simmon 8mo ago
  As an indie developer myself, I totally get both sides. Building your own tools gives you full control and no recurring costs, but maintaining them takes time too. I've found the sweet spot is building tools for problems I face daily - the time investment pays off because I use them constantly.
• fragmede 8mo ago
  A while ago I made the bold claim that I could build "your app subscription" in a week and got ridiculed for it. Now it's down to a weekend and lot less ridicule.
• ncruces 8mo ago
  What this tells me is that these should never have been a subscription. A trial, and then a $5 or $10 one time purchase. If ever you're missing some feature that gets added in a later version, then maybe a $5 upgrade. But why would a simple text or video editor need a monthly subscription?
• lionkor 8mo ago
  What about OBS for screen recording, obsidian for markdown editing (or vscode or any of the one million MD editors)? Why are the options either paid or vibe coded?
• james_marks 8mo ago
  You now own that project with all of the undiscovered bugs, missing features, and long term maintenance. Perhaps that’s a worthwhile trade, but you’re still bearing the cost in a different form.
• specproc 8mo ago
  The article tells us as much about coding as it does AI. The author cites Loom and a transcription service as their projects. They've just stitched together screen record and a video editor, and made a nice front end for Whisper. Not diminishing this, quite the opposite. Something I love about coding in the 21st century is that there's so much to build on! A lot of work is about finding two or more cool things that work well together, packaging them up nicely and creating something that's greater than the sum of its parts. I've mixed feelings about AI, but it's great for this sort of work flow. It's great for writing the tedious glue/GUI around established libraries.
• davidmurdoch 8mo ago
  I had this realization some time last year that subscription apps pricing is a race to the bottom: free. Will have to find ways of providing value outside of technology, as the technology parts, AI not included (it will cost money), will be free. We'll probably need to sell some sort of human connection/personality or tangible goods to make money in apps.
• bushido 8mo ago
  I've been doing the same. I don't mind SaaS subscription fees, but I often run into things where I need a niche feature that doesn't exist. Incidentally, I ran into something like this with WhisperFlow last year. Used it for a few weeks, loved it, basically hardly typed for the month and just spoke to my system/terminal etc. But, I ran into a unique challenge. Barking orders at my computed for 8 hours a day made me realize that I was changing how I communicated with people. Being nicer was easier to solve, but speech-to-text made me less articulate. I wasn't very articulate to begin with -- which is something that I have wanted to solve for a while. So I built my own STT app, that works in a similar way as whisperflow, with a few notable exceptions. Minor: it has dictionaries, snippets etc on a per app/website basis. Major: most notably it has rubrics on how I want to communicate in different contexts, ex: Biz Exec over email, Principle engineer in my ide/terminal. etc And scores me on areas like conciseness, flow, logical flow/ease to follow, clarity etc. every time I say anything. 10 weeks in I'm noticeably more articulate than I've ever been.
  • snarf21 8mo ago
    This feels like a far better reason to code your own; when your use case is just a bit too niche to ever be prioritized but you otherwise need a similar tool.
  • szundi 8mo ago
    [dead]
• cultofmetatron 8mo ago
  some of these apps are ridiculous. I downloaded an app to track the number of days I spend in each country. Its somewhat important for me since Im hoping countries all the time. I deleted it because while I'd hapiily pay 5-10 bucks one time, the app wanted $4/month which just seeems ridculous
• arrozconcosas 8mo ago
  Somewhere along the line software went from being $99 for life to $9.99/month for life. The net result is massive inflation. I dusted off an old video game system recently and the game still played, through the end, for just the cost of electricity. I realize that maintenance is important and should be paid for, but let's be honest maintenance is a small sliver of your monthly subscription cost.
  • sevennull 8mo ago
    yeah someone needs to vibe code all the adobe products ;)
  • threetonesun 8mo ago
    It was $99 for a specific version which (maybe) got updates. If you wanted the next version, it was another $99 (or maybe it was $129 now, or $149...). Some software essentially maintains this model, and I think it's fine. If something is going to charge monthly I expect it to either be much cheaper, or have some web service that they need to keep up.
• Invictus0 8mo ago
  It's easy to create software, it's still hard to do marketing
• Havoc 8mo ago
  I’m enjoying building my own tools via vibecoding but don’t think I could replace much this way in terms of SaaS. Most of the paid subs is specifically because i can’t easily do it myself. ie there is an attribute there that extends beyond coding skill. I can’t easily defend myself against Ddos or can’t easily do multi region redundancy etc. Stuff that even a nice home server and coding plan just can’t cover
• leothetechguy 8mo ago
  A single example being 14 cad a month, with the implication being that you have lots of monthly subscriptions for "small apps" sends shivers down my spine. I know YC has lots of wealthy people, but come on!
• pickleglitch 8mo ago
  What I don't get about this is that it looks like there are decent open-source alternatives to all of the services mentioned. The most egregious example is the markdown editor. There are lots of free, open-source markdown editors out there. Why would you vibe-code your own? Just because you can?
  • Singletoned 8mo ago
    For the same reason that there are already lots of markdown editors out there. Why didn't the they all use the first one that came out?
  • godelski 8mo ago
    This is what confused me too. Why are people paying for these types of things? They don't need vibe coding, they need a search engine. Ironically I'm confident the LLMs could find them a free version of what they're looking for. But that's the problem with them, right? They do what you ask and don't question if there's a better way
• riddu 8mo ago
  Nice! I was actually just thinking about this recently as well that over the next year, most simple SaaS products will be quickly replaced. Of course, with a lot of nuances, but still some people only need basic functionality.
• jppope 8mo ago
  Its sooooo weird to me that indie software is the target... the author is interested in replacing things that were always accessible to replace but not really worth it (Typora is still one of my favs) and not at all interested in replacing trash enterprise software. I see basically no reason why Salesforce can't be taken down by a 2-3 person team right now. Shopify? Everything Intuit? Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)?
  • jadbox 8mo ago
    The likely hard truth: 90% of software 'itself' will be easily replaceable, especially indie software. The reason why Shopify, Jira, TurboTax, etc are hard to replace is due to most of the HARD work being OUTSIDE software- the legal work for being a payment processor, legal insurance, special client relationships that only salesmen can foster, high market TRUST requirements, legal COMPLIANCE (HIPAA), etc etc. I'm fairly convinced that AI coding is going to force most programmers to move into becoming experts in specific business hard problems.
    • jppope 8mo ago
      100% we are definitely heading towards a world where we work on hard problems and novel problems. The days of a team building a dashboard for a year for a crud app are likely behind us
• fluder 8mo ago
  https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es
• jimnotgym 8mo ago
  Am I right in saying that to save myself $15 a month on an app, I need to spend $100 on Claud code?
• croes 8mo ago
  So your 10x productivity as a developer becomes useless because your customer vibe coded their own app. The IKEA effect does the rest
• migsvult 8mo ago
  This post mentions apps used as an individual. I think that more or less makes sense for some subset of engineers that enjoy this type of weekend project. But once you extend this out to an org, and you're saving a sub for every 'seat', a lot of things start making sense to homebrew. And yes, you get less polish, but you also get customizability. Our small startup reduced spend on subscriptions by several thousand by having one jr replace non-core subscriptions with simple vived alternatives over the course of a couple weeks. Even outside of the savings, I think I prefer the new apps.
• nektro 8mo ago
  if we had UBI these apps wouldn't need to charge in the first place
• gdmka 8mo ago
  Wonderful! I also run a Hugo blog, running on a very old version. I'll be honest, I'm tired of editing it in VS Code with the Markdown Rendering on the side. I was looking for something new, completely separate. Really hoping this project will work for my needs too. Thank you so much!
• idk1 8mo ago
  This is a great idea, however, for the voice dictation app. They're very hard to get right, and the quality varies across them massively. I've tried both Wisper Flow and Aqua (the one I'm typing this with, which is, in my opinion, the best at the moment) - they're so exceptionally sophisticated that I think it would be very difficult to get right in a short amount of time.