Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.

But for an app whose use case doesn’t change and is recurring for no reason? Yeah there’s probably not much value in recurring payments outside of wanting to support the developer. I pay a lot of indie devs out of the goodness of my heart, and I’ll continue to do that.

But the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.

This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for.

Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of static code. Code is a part of them, but it’s actually a minority of the work and the service. It’s very common to see founders fall out because CTOs believe product and company = tech and CEOs do not.

If you’re a technical founder, learning this lesson will separate you from the pack.

Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.

I have no philosophical objection to vibe-coding apps for yourself, but personally, I wouldn’t be 1/10th of the engineer I am if I wasn’t constantly exposed to the work of others.

For some, this trend worries software engineers — who needs software if they can vibe code it themselves? — but I am much more optimistic. I think people will start valuing good software a lot more. Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.

Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good at the first glance but get abandoned before they achieve even a 100-users maturity level.

If you aren't working 24/7 while handling a family and telling yourself your time is worth more than a small fee, you are just being lazy. I'm the same way, I am incredibly lazy and will constantly tell myself that my time is worth more. This is usually until I realize I'm spending way to much of my "money" to "save time". HourlyWage(time) = money, if I'm saving time by spending money I'm losing time. This is a basic concept and I defy anyone to show me otherwise.

We live in a time where instant gratification is the main driver behind most decisions, devaluing our currency each and every fee we succumb to... as money is time, and if time is being "saved" by spending time (in the form of money) we are now applying a future debt to the work we are doing today. You might work 40 hours one week, where at least 4 hours of that week goes to paying your streaming bill, another 8 for Internet and Phone, as well as another 2 for the coffee you didn't make that week, another hour for your notetaking app on your phone, 30 minutes for your subscription to watch funny youtuber release content early, another 2 hours for you glut of productivity apps, etc. These things all work to keep you a wage-slave till the day you eventually croak with a menial 401k.

It's embarrassing we reduce ourselves to this.

Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.

I think that many existing apps with huge userbases will gradually lose users as the models become better and better. Their biggest advantage is that people don't like change, and thus having to e.g. export data from some tools etc. seems to be a hassle not worth $5 a month. But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.

On the other hand, new products will have a much harder time to gather a big userbase. Whenever I'll see a launch of a SaaS asking for $$$, the first question I'll ask myself will be how long it will take LLM to recreate it. And for most cases, I imagine that the time it will take to get 80% of what they have is a few vibe coding sessions (as most newcomers will probably have used LLM themselves to code it up).

I see basically no reason why Salesforce can't be taken down by a 2-3 person team right now. Shopify? Everything Intuit? Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)?

But typora is actually one time purchase and one of the rare apps that is priced well with good business model.

They have probably best RTL support and I wanted like your friend to write my own focused markdown editor with RTL support using clause and made some progress but realized that the time and cost of doing this is not worth it. I just paid typora a week ago for $15.

But I understand the point and I use Claude to hack together personal tools all the time.

Might have a bit of difficulty naming it that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org).

Edit: I apparently wasn't at all the first to think of this (https://github.com/rselbach/jabber/issues/5).

Incidentally, I ran into something like this with WhisperFlow last year. Used it for a few weeks, loved it, basically hardly typed for the month and just spoke to my system/terminal etc.

But, I ran into a unique challenge. Barking orders at my computed for 8 hours a day made me realize that I was changing how I communicated with people. Being nicer was easier to solve, but speech-to-text made me less articulate. I wasn't very articulate to begin with -- which is something that I have wanted to solve for a while.

So I built my own STT app, that works in a similar way as whisperflow, with a few notable exceptions. Minor: it has dictionaries, snippets etc on a per app/website basis. Major: most notably it has rubrics on how I want to communicate in different contexts, ex: Biz Exec over email, Principle engineer in my ide/terminal. etc

And scores me on areas like conciseness, flow, logical flow/ease to follow, clarity etc. every time I say anything. 10 weeks in I'm noticeably more articulate than I've ever been.

Here's what bugs me: I cannot permanently install my apps to my iPhone because of Apple's walled garden. I need to reinstall every 7 days and constantly re-confirm that I am a "Trusted" developer.

I know I can pay Apple 100 USD a year for a developer account, but I bought this phone outright 7 years ago, I own it. (Obviously, I clearly don't in this case.) /rant

Subscription apps often have to target a wide userbase. However, most users only need a small subset of the entire feature set, and would be better served by a tailored version. This means that vibecoded apps can get away with being much less complex (specific featureset, no login etc), while still being more useful.

I have also created tools with LLMs that are exactly tailored to what I need, and still much more polished than what I could do without LLMs. Will have to think about if there is anything else I can do this with.

It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that.

I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.

There's also a story about Emacs at Amazon, where secretaries would code up elaborate things to automate their stuff. It tells you how silly our world is : we're happy with shitty uninteractive systems, languages and OSs, only so that we can fix it with the next version of "genius" AI systems which can barely do anything more than remove pain of dealing with the insane bloat.

But that’s not what Loom is about.

It’s about streaming the video.

Before:

Capture something with likes of quicktime.

Transcode it so that it doesn’t take a few gigabytes. This takes considerable time and resources (though OBS can do it while recording, not after).

Upload somewhere to share. Wait while it is uploading.

Loom takes care of all those steps so when you press stop you can immediately share the link with someone.

—

Hope other use-cases in the article are not as misrepresented as this one

I can hire a contractor to build a carport, or whack one together with some supplies from the Big Box store. More roofs being built with more price points to serve the market.

List of projects mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716805

So I decided to vibecode an app for myself and wouldn't you know? It took me a few hours and it's INCREDIBLE! No more relying on someone else to maintain something, I can simply build my own solutions, whenever I want!

I vibe coded a webapp that I was paying yearly for and the version I made does everything I wish the app I paid for did as it's 100% personalised to me.

I've been thinking for awhile that this is going to be the future and I'm already starting to think of more things I will create.

I build small web applications for my personal needs all the time by just regular programming, and I'm saving so much money by using them and not some proprietary app. Not even mentioning the advantages that it is completely bespoke, runs local and gives me peace of mind data-wise.

Some wise man once said that personal computers are a bicycle for the mind. Programming your own programs is the most pure way you train on that bicycle.

We have so many people who are so excellent and fast and developing nowadays that we can even afford the time to build things for our community, friends and even just for ourselves.

It has probably always been like this, but I am just personally observing a higher-degree of people doing and talking about it. Even just the small-web/neocities bobble points into this.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

I also run a Hugo blog, running on a very old version. I'll be honest, I'm tired of editing it in VS Code with the Markdown Rendering on the side.

I was looking for something new, completely separate. Really hoping this project will work for my needs too. Thank you so much!

Once you identify something like Handy, instruct Claude to study how that OSS project actually builds the feature and adapt the logic to your stack. AI is really good at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and understanding the full implementation.

The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces and don't capture everything otherwise. That's what I'm working on at opensource.builders[1]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook of features you can remix across stacks, with structured "skills" that point to the exact details so the porting works reliably.

[0] https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

[1] https://github.com/junaid33/opensource.builders

We can now produce products and apps that are tailored to our own preferred ways of working.

Regardless of the cost of generating them (which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription) or the effort involved (sometimes less than an hour of “vibe coding”), we’ve reached a point where the resulting product can be significantly more valuable than the existing product, service, or subscription it replaces.

That’s the whole point - there’s no need for it to be a product when you can do it yourself, and it’s the death knell of products like this.

A trial, and then a $5 or $10 one time purchase. If ever you're missing some feature that gets added in a later version, then maybe a $5 upgrade.

But why would a simple text or video editor need a monthly subscription?

Most people don't make or maintain their own things, period. Vibe coding will mostly cannibalize expensive B2B contracts from a pre-LLM era where integrations and maintenance were expensive.

cheers

Vibe-coding accelerates the destruction of basic (closed-source) apps charging a subscription for features that offer little to no value whatsoever.

Not everything has to be a SaaS, but I don't think all SaaS apps can be vibe-coded to a weekend project.

If it is solving my issues and problems, why do preaching about the merits of a proper product or paying. I'll pay for what I see value in, and vibe-code where I don't see the benefit of paying.

Maybe I miserably fail and get back to paying to product. It's all good, I take that responsibility while I start my vibe-coding session.

The cynical approach would be to make the product hard to leave. But that just means you've built a trap, not something people actually want. Eventually they escape and hate you for it.

The test I use: would people recommend this to colleagues even if there's no referral incentive? If the answer is no, I'm probably building something people tolerate rather than something they value.

The author cites Loom and a transcription service as their projects. They've just stitched together screen record and a video editor, and made a nice front end for Whisper.

Not diminishing this, quite the opposite. Something I love about coding in the 21st century is that there's so much to build on! A lot of work is about finding two or more cool things that work well together, packaging them up nicely and creating something that's greater than the sum of its parts.

I've mixed feelings about AI, but it's great for this sort of work flow. It's great for writing the tedious glue/GUI around established libraries.

It's always been free, but because of a change to the way Amazon charges third party app devs, they were going to start charging next month. Since the whole app is just a couple of API calls and storing a record of which orders you've sent the request to already, Claude Code built it in 5 minutes.

In general, the Amazon Seller UI is a cluster (especially since I have one account for each brand, so I constantly have to switch between them). There are lots of subscription apps to make your Amazon data more useful and accessible, but Claude Code with access to the Amazon APIs pretty much replaces all of them. I spend very little time in the actual Amazon UI now and mostly just ask my trusty assistant for the info that I need.

Most of the paid subs is specifically because i can’t easily do it myself. ie there is an attribute there that extends beyond coding skill. I can’t easily defend myself against Ddos or can’t easily do multi region redundancy etc. Stuff that even a nice home server and coding plan just can’t cover

Will have to find ways of providing value outside of technology, as the technology parts, AI not included (it will cost money), will be free. We'll probably need to sell some sort of human connection/personality or tangible goods to make money in apps.

End of the day, much like when photography went digital (and smartphones got good cameras), yes, there were a LOT more photos taken, but the relative proportion of outsized, lauded photographers remained fairly constant. The upshot is that WAY more people are exposed to the possibility of creating excellence than before, the downside is the market gets flooded with utility and mediocrity. Said excellence never goes away, and the same will apply to software.

The very idea that SaaS (or packaged software, or whatever) "will die" because "anybody" can prompt their way to a "personal tool" (as a mainstream exercise) is so far-fetched to me because the only people who will prompt their way to a tool ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!

Professionals who need functionality will always pay for it.

Boomer dads who can barely work a DVR will always pay for it.

Business owners who need less friction and more reliability will always pay for it.

IMO, this "I'll just replace Salesforce with my own personal CRM for $200 for a month of Claude" thing is just a hobbyist's pipe dream lol -- not that there's anything wrong with it, some people will do it, but, man, there's a reason that Netflix is Netflix, and Plex isn't Netflix.

Other thing I have experienced is my standards have changed a lot, now for $10 subscription I need a lot more, not just some simple editor or a small todolist would suffice anymore. I am not thinking about paying for new software, and in fact I am getting completely burnt out by all the sites looking the same.

Fwiw, Google has had a free in-browser tool for this for ages, makes capture really simple on any device with a browser: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/

Does that work better for maintainability than letting it decide on its own what the architecture should look like?

If so, what is your setup/workflow?

I feel like if e.g. Hypercard had lived, this would be a more defacto mode of doing things.

The other side of the coin however is a potential decline in indie hacker products.

Why are the options either paid or vibe coded?

Creating tools for your own workflows has become amazing, especially as a creator of anything it feels overwhelming with how many options there are now.

But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.

The bar for me to pay for a $10/month software subscription is pretty high, but once I make the decision that it's valuable, the actual cash cost is pretty low. Vibe coding something will never approach the quality of something that someone put enough thought and effort to turn into a product. The main place where I'll write my own software is when it's truly custom to my own needs, AI is a force multiplier for this type of work, but at the end of the day I still have very limited time to run and maintain a lot of custom software and data, so it's not going to cannibalize any of the SaaS I'm willing to pay for.

Obviously for younger software guys with more time than money, the equation will be different, but those were never the make-or-break demographic for SaaS anyway. I don't think the equation has meaningfully changed for SaaS sales due to AI, I see it more as continuously rising bar over the last two decades due to UX expectations, market saturation, limits on human attention and complexity tolerance.

And this is comparing to being subscribed many years in a row. With SaaS you can unsub and sub only when you need it again.

With your side project - a weekend of your life is invested and you will never get it back.

This is the worst use of your time if you measure it in $. If you make it for fun - sure. In all other terms it is a complete loss.

- tell me you haven't heard of OBS studio without telling me you haven't heard of OBS studio. But on a serious note OP, you should really give OBS studio a shot, it is one of the best video recording tools out there, period!

Perhaps that’s a worthwhile trade, but you’re still bearing the cost in a different form.

The IKEA effect does the rest

I replaced a whole bunch of these with one shot prompts for shits and giggles.

The interesting question is why the OP had bought these subscriptions in the first place if he was happy with less-polished alternatives.

I wonder why people still hold a lot of stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM.

It just boggles he mind how divorced from reality some people are. You could offer $fotm_ai_model with infinite usage, free apple developer account (since you're apparently replacing everything you have with homegrown stuff) and the amount of people wasting their weekends on vibe-cloning their own custom apps would still approximate to zero. This doesn't even get to the fact that the majority of apps already HAVE a free alternative, and it's certainly far less effort to replace increasingly obnoxious apple music with foobar than to build, test and then permanently support your own music player. You also probably want claude code 15 to replace anything non-trivial, otherwise, well, good luck.

I don’t think I’d bother even if my weekend had ten times as many hours as it does, and I’m a code monkey that still mostly enjoys his job.

Now that Prometheus (the myth, not the o11y tool) has dropped these LLMs on us, I've been using this thought experiment to consider the multi-layered implications:

In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food?