9 ms·

AI is going to kill app subscriptions

148 points by informal007 8mo ago

chrisjj 8mo ago
> 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. "AI", the new Napster.
- gruez 8mo ago
  Where's the analogy breaks down is that AI isn't producing verbatim copies. There's no expectation that dropbox should be protected from clones, for instance.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    How do you know you are not getting a copy identical to something the parrot found on the web?
sovietmudkipz 8mo ago
I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.” App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?
- BloondAndDoom 8mo ago
  What the OP says someone else will do it cheaper not the normies will do themselves. We already have tons of free and cheap software for the sake of it without making any commercial sense, now we will have way more it. It’s inevitable at this point.
- prinny_ 8mo ago
  I believe we are having this discussion from a purely technical perspective and not from a business one. Let's take slack for example. Assuming a company can perfectly clone it, why would they? Yes they would skip paying for it, but they would have to maintain it, starting from its infrastructure all they way up to its UI. Will they think of new features? Will they follow industry developments in sound / streaming technology? Will they keep integrating other tools into it? I am sure they would rather pay to have somebody else do it for them, someone like slack itself. 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?
mettamage 8mo ago
> 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 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
- OtomotO 8mo ago
  Exactly. 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
- barnabee 8mo ago
  They know ChatGPT exists and soon enough that'll probably be enough for many use cases.
rekabis 8mo ago
People will still pay for convenience or functionality. 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.
- BloondAndDoom 8mo ago
  Yes but they will pay less because there will 50 competitors who provide similar enough software for fraction of prices. Having a moar that’s not replicable for cheaper is rare
  - colesantiago 8mo ago
    The race to the bottom.
zug_zug 8mo ago
I mean a 10 / month pdf editor sounds like an outrageously bad deal… that’s 120 a year so good riddance 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
- knollimar 8mo ago
  Look at bluebeam revu for a good pdf editor. Pdf editing is harder than it looks
  - zug_zug 8mo ago
    Nope I'll make a google doc and export to PDF I think.
    - knollimar 8mo ago
      What if someome hands you a pdf?
camdenreslink 8mo ago
Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?
- bsder 8mo ago
  Because SaaS at the corporate level is about liability transfer first and any value or functionality is a distant second.
- OtomotO 8mo ago
  Bingo!
- bieganski 8mo ago
  their costs are bound to compute anyway, they don't mind huge compensations also - it's not much of a cost saving to re-build, even cheaply, inhouse Slack or whatever?
- onion2k 8mo ago
  That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really been that difficult. 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.
  - yellowapple 8mo ago
    On top of that, it's one thing to write the code, whereas it's another to actually run that code with maximal reliability and minimal downtime. I'm sure LLMs can churn out Terraform all day long, but can they troubleshoot when something goes wrong (as is often the case)?
cyanydeez 8mo ago
One subscription to rule them all. Subscriptions arnt going away. Software will just be like cable and now streaming.
CPLX 8mo ago
I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions. 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.
- kilroy123 8mo ago
  That's what I think will happen. Not just standards but taste and design as well. I think there's almost even more demand for good designers now than ever before. Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.
  - kranner 8mo ago
    > 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.
  - thn-gap 8mo ago
    Isn't such design something that is super easy to copy by AI anyways? Spend months working on it, and you'll just get lots of clones the next week.
- wiether 8mo ago
  > 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. 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.
avaer 8mo ago
What if "Stallman was right" and this means users will actually pay people to make software for them, even if it's "open source"? (TFA doesn't mention open source but it might as well be if cloning is cheap) Probably wouldn't be a bad thing.
Finbarr 8mo ago
I wrote an article about this a few days ago that has been gaining a lot of traction: https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  Those platforms with a moat have some breathing room but it's only a matter of time. Remember Lotus Notes?
- bwfan123 8mo ago
  > This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades 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.
MostlyStable 8mo ago
I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months? [0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545
- eterm 8mo ago
  That essay was written weeks before Opus 4.5 was released which was an inflection point for the ability of Claude code and specifically how well it would work with less guidance.
siva7 8mo ago
> People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?" That might actually become reality now. 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.
jitl 8mo ago
i don’t agree. 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.
- colesantiago 8mo ago
  Yes they are easy to clone and for good reason. Thanks to AI abundance, everyone will be better off.
mmaunder 8mo ago
I fundamentally disagree with the premise: "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.
- neversupervised 8mo ago
  Both are true. You’ll see innovation and you’ll see the cost of these very abundant simple apps go to zero. There’s no way around it. Supply and demand. Everyone can make apps, but there isn’t an obvious reason why people would be buying more apps. More apps made + same apps bought = cheaper apps.
- ninjagoo 8mo ago
  > 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. 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.
marioloko 8mo ago
I think that even if everything can be copied, some platforms are still hard to copy, and some have greater barriers that are legal compliance, and others needs to be able to scale to be viable. Even if apps can be copied, the underlying architectural decisions are usually not so visible as the interface, and the developer should have a good knowledge of building architectures to add value to the existing apps. My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.
LordHumungous 8mo ago
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.
- barnabee 8mo ago
  It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people. 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).
  - colesantiago 8mo ago
    Agreed, the abundance of many apps and the fact that subscriptions and paid apps are going to zero means anyone can make an app for themselves or use an open source one. No need to pay for someone else’s one.
  - benjiro 8mo ago
    > Good riddance to software subscriptions. 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?
ant6n 8mo ago
I think AI is going to kill my sanity. But mostly, because the websites are so bad. It's just a chat interface, but apparently nobody knows how to write those anymore. They use 1GB of memory per instance, slow to load, UI constantly crashes. Then Gemini loses all context when you stop and edit a reply. Then the bots themselves with their hallucination, their gaslighting, their covering up of mistakes, covering up that they can't read a simple PDF. Not following simple instructions. 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.
- juanani 8mo ago
  [dead]
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
kibwen 8mo ago
No. Apple makes money from subscriptions, and Apple controls the app store with an iron fist. In a hypothetical world where the price of apps falls to ~free, Apple will just ban free apps in order to recoup that revenue. Hell, if you think that you can build apps for free, then you need to explain why Apple wouldn't do the same themselves, charge users a recurring fee for the privelige of using them, and then muscle out any competitors using their natural monopoly to reap the profits for themselves. Apple doesn't work for your benefit; like every other paperclip maximizer, they have a sociopathic focus on profit at all costs.
jackhab 8mo ago
Good luck making your own clone of "simple" file sharing and synchronization app like Google Drive!
- nativeit 8mo ago
  I’ve been running NextCloud with MinIO storage for several years now. If that didn’t kill subscriptions, I highly doubt whatever very brittle, low quality knock offs an LLM would produce will.
- joquarky 8mo ago
  You mean like FTP and cron?
dzonga 8mo ago
I guess for the author's limited worldview - "apps" are only available through the app stores. 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
- andsoitis 8mo ago
  The salient point is it is becoming easier and easier for end-users to create apps for their use cases, rather than having to rely on a developer, or packaged apps.
  - ethbr1 8mo ago
    The implicit point here is that devtools-type standardization subscriptions are about to get juiced. 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.
    - chasd00 8mo ago
      Idk I was using Claude code this weekend to do some experimenting with supabase. Claude code had no issue integrating supabase into my application and even do the schema and rls setup. I think supabase is safe because it’s managed, has plenty of features, and the agents know it. That may be the key to saas survival, do the agents know about your service and how to integrate it into their work? …man that sounds scary just replace “agents” with “software devs” in my last sentence. It’s a crazy world.
- INTPenis 8mo ago
  Actually I've been making several webapps with AI lately, for things I've always wished for and can now selfhost. 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.
elicash 8mo ago
I think the options are: 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
jmkni 8mo ago
Surely unless you are building your own models, and running them locally, you still have to pay OpenAi/Anthropic/Google etc for the API usage? And even if you do build your own models, unless they run locally on the device, you still need to pay for hosting?
marcuskaz 8mo ago
I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use. If your software doesn't provide a service, like sync, storage, availability, if it is just local, it'll be a tough market. 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.
- adventured 8mo ago
  Open source should acquire greater, multiplied value once the new scaffolding is put into place. The open source community is still using the past approach, which is going to be largely washed away. 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.
- TZubiri 8mo ago
  You mean postman the curl frontend with a lot of bloat and an account + price tag? Not really the example of a very valuable app to begin with.
  - mythrwy 8mo ago
    Exactly. I never saw a reason for that to be a paid service in the first place.
colesantiago 8mo ago
This is good. 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.
adventured 8mo ago
It's software eating everything that it can as capabilities and reach are added. This has been going on since the earliest software programs launched. 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.
tomleelive 8mo ago
From a developer's perspective, it seems like we're at a point where we're increasingly concerned about how to make a living and how to pursue a career.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
_thisdot 8mo ago
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore Never did tbh. These apps should be one time purchases at best.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
neya 8mo ago
> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. 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
- Dansvidania 8mo ago
  Vibe code to production perhaps not, but vibe code for regular personal use doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility already. 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.
  - cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
    3d printing is something I think about. LLMs do their best work against text and 3d printers consume gcode. I’ve had sonnet spit out perfectly good single layer test prints. Obviously it won’t have the context window to hold much more gcode BUT… 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…
sunir 8mo ago
After the dot.com, there was the O-pocalypse that terrified me as a recent grad. - 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.
- bwfan123 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - oidar 8mo ago
    I think a more apt comparison is "human computers" and live telephone operators.
- topocite 8mo ago
  What happened last time is exactly what will never happen again because those were all specific one off, path dependent, moments in time. 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.
sergiotapia 8mo ago
Have you seen non-technical people use AI for anything beyond read my emails or add a column to my sheet? 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.
orasis 8mo ago
This is a terrible take. Competition in the app space is competition for distribution/attention. Subscriptions are just how apps convert that attention to dollars. Consumers almost never price shop apps.
tiku 8mo ago
Only unique data will be worth something.
weatherlite 8mo ago
There's a whole class of SAAS that's relatively well protected and that is everything that has to do with proprietry, hard to get data. For example a big cyber company like CrowdStrike could (and probably does) decare that its impossible to clone its cyber solution because their solutions and algorithms were trained on and improved on tons of clients data. So there's that - the data moat. Other than that I suppose everything that's a pain in the butt to duplicate - lots of regulation, tax codes etc etc. Think Shopify for instance, it's not just cloning the UI and some CRUD you need to clone a whole shitload of boring backend work that deals with this shit - and then keep a bunch of agents to constanty supervise regulation and update the software (And perhaps have a few humans overseeing the whole process); is it worth having the agents + few humans in the loop over paying for Shopify ? Currently - I doubt it. When agent costs plummet to almost zero and you dont need any humans in the loop - yes, probably worth it. We're not there yet.
tinyhouse 8mo ago
I think the article has some truth but the author also ignores something important. Yes, subscription costs are going down. But there's a big difference between consumer and enterprise. Everyone needs to build fast now. A company cannot get distracted by building capabilities in-house that are not core to their product. This was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow. That means they will keep paying for quality solutions and not settle for sub-par solutions just because someone made them for free (there was always an open source solution available long before AI entered the scene). I may argue that not settling is even more important now that moving fast is key. 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.
benoau 8mo ago
Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does it.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
  I' not sure for the reason that for every one of the successful subscription apps there were dozens of free or nearly free competitors. The app stores have been awash with wannabe clones from the start.
  - benoau 8mo ago
    Yeah but virtually all customer acquisition comes from either being featured or paying for ads both of which favour subscription apps over free/nearly-free.
TZubiri 8mo ago
I have no idea where this theory that SaaS is dead because vibe coding came from. 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.
- rmoriz 8mo ago
  I don’t want to speculate who is behind that. Clearly some SaaS shops are way overpriced but this is in no way the end of the business modell. Some contrarian will find the right timing to counter play and become more wealthy…
neon_me 8mo ago
Subscription is not about app ownership, but mostly running the infra. AI is going to make basically everything even more expensive and subscription based. Your point is based on wrong assumptions.
- notahacker 8mo ago
  Yeah. There's a power law distribution in successful apps. The valuable ones wrap content, networks, products your enterprise is subscribed to, or at least rank ahead of similar themed games or an abundance of free with ads clones in an App Store as the "everybody uses this, it just works and you can share with them too" solution. 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
- throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
  That is an underappreciated point. Wrappers around LLMs are _many_ magnitudes more expensive to run than current SaaS apps.
rmoriz 8mo ago
By using an external service, people outsource problems. Using agentic coding to „clone“ a service by naively specifying the features (not the implementation) will insource the problem. If the problem is static, separated, well understood and used internally only, it may be okay to do so. In other circumstances I highly doubt it. SaaS markt will come back stronger once people suffered enough pain in doing „the app myself“.
ivanjermakov 8mo ago
"I copied an icon from desktop to a thumb drive to copy the whole program" mindset.
markbao 8mo ago
Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc… 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.
- xnx 8mo ago
  Or is the claim that someone will write the app and sell it for $5 one time or give it away free?
  - markbao 8mo ago
    Yes, that’s a possibility! And for app types that have a limited ceiling of how much value they can provide, that will definitely be a thing as an AI app can saturate all of that value. 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.
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!
  - esafak 8mo ago
    That's just a contrived example. Every application involves a million subjective decisions; from the architecture, algorithms, to the UI/UX.
beej71 8mo ago
A lot of these apps already have free versions and businesses still stick with the paid ones. There's value in someone else taking responsibility.
jkla562 8mo ago
The article's right that build costs are collapsing, but that was rarely the hard part. The cost of a real product is architecture decisions, security, data modeling, ops — stuff that doesn't disappear because Claude wrote your CRUD layer. 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.
fzaninotto 8mo ago
I don't agree with the premise that we pay a subscription because there is no better and cheaper alternative. We pay Slack subscriptions but we could get IRC for free. We pay Google Drive subscription but we could get rsync for free. 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.
tempodox 8mo ago
This is yet another fairytale to sell us more “AI” subscriptions.
yobbo 8mo ago
> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. 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.
jweatherby 8mo ago
The trick with this wave of fast apps will be getting others to use the things that are built. Sure you can build something for yourself quickly enough, but you'll likely need the rest of your team onboard, which comes with a slew of other problems and complexities.
port11 8mo ago
Oh, thank god, it had been a week since we last saw a post about AI killing something. It’s subscriptions this time, all users will be vibe coding apps on their spare time.
sim04ful 8mo ago
I daresay we're going to see a burgeoning situations where the software (code) is open-sourced under a permissive or copyleft license, while the associated data, content, or assets (e.g., datasets, models, or databases) are handled under separate, often more restrictive licenses.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
impure 8mo ago
Making the app is the easy part. The hard part is getting users. Also I have doubts if AI can make a sufficiently complex app.
- joquarky 8mo ago
  It's a whole lot easier if the app is intended to have only one user.
jacobjjacob 8mo ago
No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that
- wiredpancake 8mo ago
  [dead]
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
  I've got the PDF specification on my desk at the moment. 1200 pages of vague details on the format. I don't know why you expect to get a product that works with that for nothing.
  - knollimar 8mo ago
    It's crazy that we think the software is simple just because someone made it already.
whurley23 8mo ago
Building a UI is fairly simple, all things considered. Building a full-scale system? Much harder. Deploying it so it can be multi-user? Maintaining it? These are things that separate toys from products.
cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
AI won’t kill subscriptions but it will drive prices down. Viable competitors will emerge and incumbency will become a less viable long term play. 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.
deafpolygon 8mo ago
Honestly, AI is just going to accelerate app subscriptions. Since it costs nothing to build now, you can just make your own SaaS and charge some money.
- dangus 8mo ago
  All of these people predicting the death of SaaS are going to look incredibly silly in 5-10 years. 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.
informal007 8mo ago
Another reason that push to kill subscription is that many users just want software that actually works forever—no subscriptions, no ads. That’s why so many of us prefer one-time purchases. I’m definitely in that camp. I stick to local-first apps because I know they won't get worse over time.
dasil003 8mo ago
This is absolute nonsense. The app stores are already saturated with tons of free apps that no one uses. Sure the numbers are up—10x of infinity is still infinity—and the reason Apple doesn't care is because this is just the natural end game of their strategy to commoditize their complement. 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.
kirykl 8mo ago
like how Roombas killed the housekeeping industry ?
tithos 8mo ago
That would be awesome. Subscriptions made web development suck. It used to be so fun.
qnleigh 8mo ago
I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself. 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.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  It's early days yet. You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology, if you were just starting out as a freshly-minted MD. And yes, this is going to be a problem, possibly a big one. See also: air traffic control.
  - J_Shelby_J 8mo ago
    “Claude write me an app to do air traffic control. Make sure planes don’t crash. Here is a hundred years of rules and their context.”
    - CamperBob2 8mo ago
      Video game AI from 20 years ago was already good enough to perform ATC at an algorithmic level. It's not a difficult problem, if approached as a system, because there are no surprises left in the field. Every situation that will ever need to be handled by ATC has either been encountered and understood by now, or can reasonably be anticipated and modeled, making it a good candidate for automation. 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.
  - 8mo ago
belZaah 8mo ago
The premise here seems to be, that the code is where the value is created. That’s maybe true for some apps but not every one. Apps can facilitate interactions (eg Training Peaks), store data long term (eg MyFitnessPal) or act as a part of a complex network of complementary goods (eg Garmin Connect). The last part is especially important: the ability to create something does not necessarily mean the ability to gain value from it.
torginus 8mo ago
I wonder if this was the true message of the Claude C compiler - not that Claude can clone a compiler, but that Anthropic has built a harness, which it can use to observe the behavior and outputs of an existing program (GCC) - it can recreate it with a good enough (at least functioning) replica.
Havoc 8mo ago
> Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions 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)
anonzzzies 8mo ago
Longer term this can happen but currently... I'm sure that even people who are not software people and do this for them alone, if they do this, will jump of a bridge after a few months when yet somehow something else (the vacation pics before 2014) just disappeared and AI comes with 'I found the bug! The migration blabhalbha. All your data gone. Question, Do you have a backup?' etc. And this potentially every change. Software devs deal with that all the time, but this is not going to work yet otherwise. We get tremendous value out of it for our company but we didn't drop our extreme rigid development process for some vibe coding; we vibe code but with a lot of guardrails which we built up over decades to deal with outsourcing companies (many of them far worse than any modern LLM tool) for our clients. 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.
alex_x 8mo ago
One of the reasons I built pocket.codes https://www.linkedin.com/posts/afedosov_when-i-started-my-career-the-cheapest-app-ugcPost-7425134295712858112-bMb0 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/afedosov_when-i-started-my-ca... Apple is being Apple and not letting me to release it however :(
flohofwoe 8mo ago
Counterpoint: why even use LLMs to create apps when the prompting session is the one universal app which can directly solve any problem a specialized app would solve (yes, it's all extremely silly, but so is the article).
wodenokoto 8mo ago
So how is chatgpt going to get me free delivery on Amazon? Not to say, show me Netflix shows, or even more circular: let me chat with chatgpt for free? Those 3 are my top-of-the-head current app subscriptions I pay for.
- cced 8mo ago
  Imo those web apps are all infrastructure services: logistic network, content library access, and hardware access.
  - mvdtnz 8mo ago
    Yeah. Exactly. Most of the stuff you pay for is. Hardly anything is pure app without some kind of value external to the software.
CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago
This whole thing of "AI makes it possible for everyone to do it" has led to shit books on Amazon, shit videos on YT, and now we're looking at shit apps on the app store. As many have said, making stuff isn't the hard part. Making good stuff is the hard part.
frizlab 8mo ago
AI is itself a subscription. They ain’t going nowhere…
erelong 8mo ago
Honestly even before AI, open source or other things made it possible to skip a lot of subscriptions
redhale 8mo ago
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free. 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.
- ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
  It's just the same community of people who believe they are unable/it is beneath them to acquire skills because of some impending super-automation that will let them do everything great that they have envisioned but have previously been stifled by the aforementioned lack of skills moving from one hype-bubble to the next.
legacynl 8mo ago
I love these kinds of articles. Predictions for the future based on nothing more than 5 minutes of surface level contemplation. No sources given.
Rover222 8mo ago
A lot of apps that people subscribe to are for the network effect (dating apps, workout apps, etc). Just because you can develop and/or run something locally on the cheap, doesn’t mean it’ll have the same value.
rglover 8mo ago
Not for technical reasons, but because it enables the masses to flood the market with low-quality software. Eventually people just won't bother because there's too much junk to wade through (and no reliable method of curation/validation).
- phito 8mo ago
  Definitely this, my hobby is already filled with a ton of sloppy vibe coded apps that all do the same thing very badly with awful UI/UX. They all ask for a monthly subscription and, surprise, nobody uses them. Meanwhile the hand crafted app that does the same thing gets put in the same bucket as the AI slop ones and is ignored.
KevinMS 8mo ago
> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free. 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.
- tomasphan 8mo ago
  Free sites steal your data. Besides people don't care about the tool, they care about the result. People don't want a faster horse. I strongly believe that this will democratize "doing things" with computers where the tool doesn't matter anymore.
- nkotov 8mo ago
  Same goes for Docusign - many competitors exist but the reason Docusign is still popular is because they own the verb and "trust" of the general population.
boyka 8mo ago
As if „deploying“ your app to your iPhone was free…
ass22 8mo ago
Simple takes are never correct. Just like the radiologists example has been proven wrong. 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.
Ronrey 8mo ago
Solo founder running 56 microservices and 69 autonomous agents in production. AI collapsed the build cost by 40-60x, but every architecture decision, security boundary, and ops choice still required experience. The article gets the direction right but the conclusion wrong — subscriptions don't die, per-seat pricing does. When agents are doing the work instead of humans clicking dashboards, you price
mediumsmart 8mo ago
Godspeed
firemelt 8mo ago
instead of random web app to do some modification on image. now I can use ffmpeg assisted with ai. good riddance.

148 points by informal007 8mo ago

> 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. "AI", the new Napster.

gruez 8mo ago
Where's the analogy breaks down is that AI isn't producing verbatim copies. There's no expectation that dropbox should be protected from clones, for instance.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  How do you know you are not getting a copy identical to something the parrot found on the web?

sovietmudkipz 8mo ago

I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.” App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?

BloondAndDoom 8mo ago
What the OP says someone else will do it cheaper not the normies will do themselves. We already have tons of free and cheap software for the sake of it without making any commercial sense, now we will have way more it. It’s inevitable at this point.
prinny_ 8mo ago
I believe we are having this discussion from a purely technical perspective and not from a business one. Let's take slack for example. Assuming a company can perfectly clone it, why would they? Yes they would skip paying for it, but they would have to maintain it, starting from its infrastructure all they way up to its UI. Will they think of new features? Will they follow industry developments in sound / streaming technology? Will they keep integrating other tools into it? I am sure they would rather pay to have somebody else do it for them, someone like slack itself. 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?

mettamage 8mo ago

> 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 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

OtomotO 8mo ago
Exactly. 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
barnabee 8mo ago
They know ChatGPT exists and soon enough that'll probably be enough for many use cases.

rekabis 8mo ago

People will still pay for convenience or functionality. 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.

BloondAndDoom 8mo ago
Yes but they will pay less because there will 50 competitors who provide similar enough software for fraction of prices. Having a moar that’s not replicable for cheaper is rare
- colesantiago 8mo ago
  The race to the bottom.

zug_zug 8mo ago

I mean a 10 / month pdf editor sounds like an outrageously bad deal… that’s 120 a year so good riddance 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

knollimar 8mo ago
Look at bluebeam revu for a good pdf editor. Pdf editing is harder than it looks
- zug_zug 8mo ago
  Nope I'll make a google doc and export to PDF I think.
  - knollimar 8mo ago
    What if someome hands you a pdf?

camdenreslink 8mo ago

Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?

bsder 8mo ago
Because SaaS at the corporate level is about liability transfer first and any value or functionality is a distant second.
OtomotO 8mo ago
Bingo!
bieganski 8mo ago
their costs are bound to compute anyway, they don't mind huge compensations also - it's not much of a cost saving to re-build, even cheaply, inhouse Slack or whatever?
onion2k 8mo ago
That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really been that difficult. 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.
- yellowapple 8mo ago
  On top of that, it's one thing to write the code, whereas it's another to actually run that code with maximal reliability and minimal downtime. I'm sure LLMs can churn out Terraform all day long, but can they troubleshoot when something goes wrong (as is often the case)?

cyanydeez 8mo ago

One subscription to rule them all. Subscriptions arnt going away. Software will just be like cable and now streaming.

CPLX 8mo ago

I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions. 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.

kilroy123 8mo ago
That's what I think will happen. Not just standards but taste and design as well. I think there's almost even more demand for good designers now than ever before. Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.
- kranner 8mo ago
  > 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.
- thn-gap 8mo ago
  Isn't such design something that is super easy to copy by AI anyways? Spend months working on it, and you'll just get lots of clones the next week.
wiether 8mo ago
> 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. 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.

avaer 8mo ago

What if "Stallman was right" and this means users will actually pay people to make software for them, even if it's "open source"? (TFA doesn't mention open source but it might as well be if cloning is cheap) Probably wouldn't be a bad thing.

Finbarr 8mo ago

I wrote an article about this a few days ago that has been gaining a lot of traction: https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.

reactordev 8mo ago
Those platforms with a moat have some breathing room but it's only a matter of time. Remember Lotus Notes?
bwfan123 8mo ago
> This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades 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.

MostlyStable 8mo ago

I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months? [0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545

eterm 8mo ago
That essay was written weeks before Opus 4.5 was released which was an inflection point for the ability of Claude code and specifically how well it would work with less guidance.

siva7 8mo ago

> People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?" That might actually become reality now. 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.

jitl 8mo ago

i don’t agree. 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.

colesantiago 8mo ago
Yes they are easy to clone and for good reason. Thanks to AI abundance, everyone will be better off.

mmaunder 8mo ago

I fundamentally disagree with the premise: "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.

neversupervised 8mo ago
Both are true. You’ll see innovation and you’ll see the cost of these very abundant simple apps go to zero. There’s no way around it. Supply and demand. Everyone can make apps, but there isn’t an obvious reason why people would be buying more apps. More apps made + same apps bought = cheaper apps.
ninjagoo 8mo ago
> 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. 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.

marioloko 8mo ago

I think that even if everything can be copied, some platforms are still hard to copy, and some have greater barriers that are legal compliance, and others needs to be able to scale to be viable. Even if apps can be copied, the underlying architectural decisions are usually not so visible as the interface, and the developer should have a good knowledge of building architectures to add value to the existing apps. My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.

LordHumungous 8mo ago

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.

barnabee 8mo ago
It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people. 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).
- colesantiago 8mo ago
  Agreed, the abundance of many apps and the fact that subscriptions and paid apps are going to zero means anyone can make an app for themselves or use an open source one. No need to pay for someone else’s one.
- benjiro 8mo ago
  > Good riddance to software subscriptions. 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?

ant6n 8mo ago

I think AI is going to kill my sanity. But mostly, because the websites are so bad. It's just a chat interface, but apparently nobody knows how to write those anymore. They use 1GB of memory per instance, slow to load, UI constantly crashes. Then Gemini loses all context when you stop and edit a reply. Then the bots themselves with their hallucination, their gaslighting, their covering up of mistakes, covering up that they can't read a simple PDF. Not following simple instructions. 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.

juanani 8mo ago
[dead]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

kibwen 8mo ago

No. Apple makes money from subscriptions, and Apple controls the app store with an iron fist. In a hypothetical world where the price of apps falls to ~free, Apple will just ban free apps in order to recoup that revenue. Hell, if you think that you can build apps for free, then you need to explain why Apple wouldn't do the same themselves, charge users a recurring fee for the privelige of using them, and then muscle out any competitors using their natural monopoly to reap the profits for themselves. Apple doesn't work for your benefit; like every other paperclip maximizer, they have a sociopathic focus on profit at all costs.

jackhab 8mo ago

Good luck making your own clone of "simple" file sharing and synchronization app like Google Drive!

nativeit 8mo ago
I’ve been running NextCloud with MinIO storage for several years now. If that didn’t kill subscriptions, I highly doubt whatever very brittle, low quality knock offs an LLM would produce will.
joquarky 8mo ago
You mean like FTP and cron?

dzonga 8mo ago

I guess for the author's limited worldview - "apps" are only available through the app stores. 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

andsoitis 8mo ago
The salient point is it is becoming easier and easier for end-users to create apps for their use cases, rather than having to rely on a developer, or packaged apps.
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  The implicit point here is that devtools-type standardization subscriptions are about to get juiced. 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.
  - chasd00 8mo ago
    Idk I was using Claude code this weekend to do some experimenting with supabase. Claude code had no issue integrating supabase into my application and even do the schema and rls setup. I think supabase is safe because it’s managed, has plenty of features, and the agents know it. That may be the key to saas survival, do the agents know about your service and how to integrate it into their work? …man that sounds scary just replace “agents” with “software devs” in my last sentence. It’s a crazy world.
INTPenis 8mo ago
Actually I've been making several webapps with AI lately, for things I've always wished for and can now selfhost. 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.

elicash 8mo ago

I think the options are: 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

jmkni 8mo ago

Surely unless you are building your own models, and running them locally, you still have to pay OpenAi/Anthropic/Google etc for the API usage? And even if you do build your own models, unless they run locally on the device, you still need to pay for hosting?

marcuskaz 8mo ago

I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use. If your software doesn't provide a service, like sync, storage, availability, if it is just local, it'll be a tough market. 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.

adventured 8mo ago
Open source should acquire greater, multiplied value once the new scaffolding is put into place. The open source community is still using the past approach, which is going to be largely washed away. 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.
TZubiri 8mo ago
You mean postman the curl frontend with a lot of bloat and an account + price tag? Not really the example of a very valuable app to begin with.
- mythrwy 8mo ago
  Exactly. I never saw a reason for that to be a paid service in the first place.

colesantiago 8mo ago

This is good. 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.

adventured 8mo ago

It's software eating everything that it can as capabilities and reach are added. This has been going on since the earliest software programs launched. 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.

tomleelive 8mo ago

From a developer's perspective, it seems like we're at a point where we're increasingly concerned about how to make a living and how to pursue a career.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

_thisdot 8mo ago

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore Never did tbh. These apps should be one time purchases at best.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

neya 8mo ago

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. 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

Dansvidania 8mo ago
Vibe code to production perhaps not, but vibe code for regular personal use doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility already. 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.
- cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
  3d printing is something I think about. LLMs do their best work against text and 3d printers consume gcode. I’ve had sonnet spit out perfectly good single layer test prints. Obviously it won’t have the context window to hold much more gcode BUT… 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…

sunir 8mo ago

After the dot.com, there was the O-pocalypse that terrified me as a recent grad. - 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.

bwfan123 8mo ago
> 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.
- oidar 8mo ago
  I think a more apt comparison is "human computers" and live telephone operators.
topocite 8mo ago
What happened last time is exactly what will never happen again because those were all specific one off, path dependent, moments in time. 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.

sergiotapia 8mo ago

Have you seen non-technical people use AI for anything beyond read my emails or add a column to my sheet? 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.

orasis 8mo ago

This is a terrible take. Competition in the app space is competition for distribution/attention. Subscriptions are just how apps convert that attention to dollars. Consumers almost never price shop apps.

tiku 8mo ago

Only unique data will be worth something.

weatherlite 8mo ago

There's a whole class of SAAS that's relatively well protected and that is everything that has to do with proprietry, hard to get data. For example a big cyber company like CrowdStrike could (and probably does) decare that its impossible to clone its cyber solution because their solutions and algorithms were trained on and improved on tons of clients data. So there's that - the data moat. Other than that I suppose everything that's a pain in the butt to duplicate - lots of regulation, tax codes etc etc. Think Shopify for instance, it's not just cloning the UI and some CRUD you need to clone a whole shitload of boring backend work that deals with this shit - and then keep a bunch of agents to constanty supervise regulation and update the software (And perhaps have a few humans overseeing the whole process); is it worth having the agents + few humans in the loop over paying for Shopify ? Currently - I doubt it. When agent costs plummet to almost zero and you dont need any humans in the loop - yes, probably worth it. We're not there yet.

tinyhouse 8mo ago

I think the article has some truth but the author also ignores something important. Yes, subscription costs are going down. But there's a big difference between consumer and enterprise. Everyone needs to build fast now. A company cannot get distracted by building capabilities in-house that are not core to their product. This was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow. That means they will keep paying for quality solutions and not settle for sub-par solutions just because someone made them for free (there was always an open source solution available long before AI entered the scene). I may argue that not settling is even more important now that moving fast is key. 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.

benoau 8mo ago

Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does it.

tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
I' not sure for the reason that for every one of the successful subscription apps there were dozens of free or nearly free competitors. The app stores have been awash with wannabe clones from the start.
- benoau 8mo ago
  Yeah but virtually all customer acquisition comes from either being featured or paying for ads both of which favour subscription apps over free/nearly-free.

TZubiri 8mo ago

I have no idea where this theory that SaaS is dead because vibe coding came from. 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.

rmoriz 8mo ago
I don’t want to speculate who is behind that. Clearly some SaaS shops are way overpriced but this is in no way the end of the business modell. Some contrarian will find the right timing to counter play and become more wealthy…

neon_me 8mo ago

Subscription is not about app ownership, but mostly running the infra. AI is going to make basically everything even more expensive and subscription based. Your point is based on wrong assumptions.

notahacker 8mo ago
Yeah. There's a power law distribution in successful apps. The valuable ones wrap content, networks, products your enterprise is subscribed to, or at least rank ahead of similar themed games or an abundance of free with ads clones in an App Store as the "everybody uses this, it just works and you can share with them too" solution. 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
throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
That is an underappreciated point. Wrappers around LLMs are _many_ magnitudes more expensive to run than current SaaS apps.

rmoriz 8mo ago

By using an external service, people outsource problems. Using agentic coding to „clone“ a service by naively specifying the features (not the implementation) will insource the problem. If the problem is static, separated, well understood and used internally only, it may be okay to do so. In other circumstances I highly doubt it. SaaS markt will come back stronger once people suffered enough pain in doing „the app myself“.

ivanjermakov 8mo ago

"I copied an icon from desktop to a thumb drive to copy the whole program" mindset.

markbao 8mo ago

Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc… 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.

xnx 8mo ago
Or is the claim that someone will write the app and sell it for $5 one time or give it away free?
- markbao 8mo ago
  Yes, that’s a possibility! And for app types that have a limited ceiling of how much value they can provide, that will definitely be a thing as an AI app can saturate all of that value. 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.
SoftTalker 8mo ago
Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!
- esafak 8mo ago
  That's just a contrived example. Every application involves a million subjective decisions; from the architecture, algorithms, to the UI/UX.

beej71 8mo ago

A lot of these apps already have free versions and businesses still stick with the paid ones. There's value in someone else taking responsibility.

jkla562 8mo ago

The article's right that build costs are collapsing, but that was rarely the hard part. The cost of a real product is architecture decisions, security, data modeling, ops — stuff that doesn't disappear because Claude wrote your CRUD layer. 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.

fzaninotto 8mo ago

I don't agree with the premise that we pay a subscription because there is no better and cheaper alternative. We pay Slack subscriptions but we could get IRC for free. We pay Google Drive subscription but we could get rsync for free. 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.

tempodox 8mo ago

This is yet another fairytale to sell us more “AI” subscriptions.

yobbo 8mo ago

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. 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.

jweatherby 8mo ago

The trick with this wave of fast apps will be getting others to use the things that are built. Sure you can build something for yourself quickly enough, but you'll likely need the rest of your team onboard, which comes with a slew of other problems and complexities.

port11 8mo ago

Oh, thank god, it had been a week since we last saw a post about AI killing something. It’s subscriptions this time, all users will be vibe coding apps on their spare time.

sim04ful 8mo ago

I daresay we're going to see a burgeoning situations where the software (code) is open-sourced under a permissive or copyleft license, while the associated data, content, or assets (e.g., datasets, models, or databases) are handled under separate, often more restrictive licenses.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

impure 8mo ago

Making the app is the easy part. The hard part is getting users. Also I have doubts if AI can make a sufficiently complex app.

joquarky 8mo ago
It's a whole lot easier if the app is intended to have only one user.

jacobjjacob 8mo ago

No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that

wiredpancake 8mo ago
[dead]
tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
I've got the PDF specification on my desk at the moment. 1200 pages of vague details on the format. I don't know why you expect to get a product that works with that for nothing.
- knollimar 8mo ago
  It's crazy that we think the software is simple just because someone made it already.

whurley23 8mo ago

Building a UI is fairly simple, all things considered. Building a full-scale system? Much harder. Deploying it so it can be multi-user? Maintaining it? These are things that separate toys from products.

cadamsdotcom 8mo ago

AI won’t kill subscriptions but it will drive prices down. Viable competitors will emerge and incumbency will become a less viable long term play. 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.

deafpolygon 8mo ago

Honestly, AI is just going to accelerate app subscriptions. Since it costs nothing to build now, you can just make your own SaaS and charge some money.

dangus 8mo ago
All of these people predicting the death of SaaS are going to look incredibly silly in 5-10 years. 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.

informal007 8mo ago

Another reason that push to kill subscription is that many users just want software that actually works forever—no subscriptions, no ads. That’s why so many of us prefer one-time purchases. I’m definitely in that camp. I stick to local-first apps because I know they won't get worse over time.

dasil003 8mo ago

This is absolute nonsense. The app stores are already saturated with tons of free apps that no one uses. Sure the numbers are up—10x of infinity is still infinity—and the reason Apple doesn't care is because this is just the natural end game of their strategy to commoditize their complement. 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.

kirykl 8mo ago

like how Roombas killed the housekeeping industry ?

tithos 8mo ago

That would be awesome. Subscriptions made web development suck. It used to be so fun.

qnleigh 8mo ago

I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself. 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.

CamperBob2 8mo ago
It's early days yet. You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology, if you were just starting out as a freshly-minted MD. And yes, this is going to be a problem, possibly a big one. See also: air traffic control.
- J_Shelby_J 8mo ago
  “Claude write me an app to do air traffic control. Make sure planes don’t crash. Here is a hundred years of rules and their context.”
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    Video game AI from 20 years ago was already good enough to perform ATC at an algorithmic level. It's not a difficult problem, if approached as a system, because there are no surprises left in the field. Every situation that will ever need to be handled by ATC has either been encountered and understood by now, or can reasonably be anticipated and modeled, making it a good candidate for automation. 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.
- 8mo ago

belZaah 8mo ago

The premise here seems to be, that the code is where the value is created. That’s maybe true for some apps but not every one. Apps can facilitate interactions (eg Training Peaks), store data long term (eg MyFitnessPal) or act as a part of a complex network of complementary goods (eg Garmin Connect). The last part is especially important: the ability to create something does not necessarily mean the ability to gain value from it.

torginus 8mo ago

I wonder if this was the true message of the Claude C compiler - not that Claude can clone a compiler, but that Anthropic has built a harness, which it can use to observe the behavior and outputs of an existing program (GCC) - it can recreate it with a good enough (at least functioning) replica.

Havoc 8mo ago

> Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions 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)

anonzzzies 8mo ago

Longer term this can happen but currently... I'm sure that even people who are not software people and do this for them alone, if they do this, will jump of a bridge after a few months when yet somehow something else (the vacation pics before 2014) just disappeared and AI comes with 'I found the bug! The migration blabhalbha. All your data gone. Question, Do you have a backup?' etc. And this potentially every change. Software devs deal with that all the time, but this is not going to work yet otherwise. We get tremendous value out of it for our company but we didn't drop our extreme rigid development process for some vibe coding; we vibe code but with a lot of guardrails which we built up over decades to deal with outsourcing companies (many of them far worse than any modern LLM tool) for our clients. 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.

alex_x 8mo ago

One of the reasons I built pocket.codes https://www.linkedin.com/posts/afedosov_when-i-started-my-career-the-cheapest-app-ugcPost-7425134295712858112-bMb0 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/afedosov_when-i-started-my-ca... Apple is being Apple and not letting me to release it however :(

flohofwoe 8mo ago

Counterpoint: why even use LLMs to create apps when the prompting session is the one universal app which can directly solve any problem a specialized app would solve (yes, it's all extremely silly, but so is the article).

wodenokoto 8mo ago

So how is chatgpt going to get me free delivery on Amazon? Not to say, show me Netflix shows, or even more circular: let me chat with chatgpt for free? Those 3 are my top-of-the-head current app subscriptions I pay for.

cced 8mo ago
Imo those web apps are all infrastructure services: logistic network, content library access, and hardware access.
- mvdtnz 8mo ago
  Yeah. Exactly. Most of the stuff you pay for is. Hardly anything is pure app without some kind of value external to the software.

CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago

This whole thing of "AI makes it possible for everyone to do it" has led to shit books on Amazon, shit videos on YT, and now we're looking at shit apps on the app store. As many have said, making stuff isn't the hard part. Making good stuff is the hard part.

frizlab 8mo ago

AI is itself a subscription. They ain’t going nowhere…

erelong 8mo ago

Honestly even before AI, open source or other things made it possible to skip a lot of subscriptions

redhale 8mo ago

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free. 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.

ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
It's just the same community of people who believe they are unable/it is beneath them to acquire skills because of some impending super-automation that will let them do everything great that they have envisioned but have previously been stifled by the aforementioned lack of skills moving from one hype-bubble to the next.

legacynl 8mo ago

I love these kinds of articles. Predictions for the future based on nothing more than 5 minutes of surface level contemplation. No sources given.

Rover222 8mo ago

A lot of apps that people subscribe to are for the network effect (dating apps, workout apps, etc). Just because you can develop and/or run something locally on the cheap, doesn’t mean it’ll have the same value.

rglover 8mo ago

Not for technical reasons, but because it enables the masses to flood the market with low-quality software. Eventually people just won't bother because there's too much junk to wade through (and no reliable method of curation/validation).

phito 8mo ago
Definitely this, my hobby is already filled with a ton of sloppy vibe coded apps that all do the same thing very badly with awful UI/UX. They all ask for a monthly subscription and, surprise, nobody uses them. Meanwhile the hand crafted app that does the same thing gets put in the same bucket as the AI slop ones and is ignored.

KevinMS 8mo ago

> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free. 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.

tomasphan 8mo ago
Free sites steal your data. Besides people don't care about the tool, they care about the result. People don't want a faster horse. I strongly believe that this will democratize "doing things" with computers where the tool doesn't matter anymore.
nkotov 8mo ago
Same goes for Docusign - many competitors exist but the reason Docusign is still popular is because they own the verb and "trust" of the general population.

boyka 8mo ago

As if „deploying“ your app to your iPhone was free…

ass22 8mo ago

Simple takes are never correct. Just like the radiologists example has been proven wrong. 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.

Ronrey 8mo ago

Solo founder running 56 microservices and 69 autonomous agents in production. AI collapsed the build cost by 40-60x, but every architecture decision, security boundary, and ops choice still required experience. The article gets the direction right but the conclusion wrong — subscriptions don't die, per-seat pricing does. When agents are doing the work instead of humans clicking dashboards, you price

mediumsmart 8mo ago

Godspeed

firemelt 8mo ago

instead of random web app to do some modification on image. now I can use ffmpeg assisted with ai. good riddance.