- > 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.
by camdenreslink
8 subcomments
- 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?
- 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.
- 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
by CrzyLngPwd
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
by LordHumungous
3 subcomments
- > 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by cadamsdotcom
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by MostlyStable
1 subcomments
- 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...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545
by sovietmudkipz
2 subcomments
- 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…?
by anonzzzies
0 subcomment
- 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.
- > 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.
by fzaninotto
0 subcomment
- 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.
by marcuskaz
5 subcomments
- 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.
by tomleelive
0 subcomment
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- One of the reasons I built pocket.codes https://www.linkedin.com/posts/afedosov_when-i-started-my-ca...
Apple is being Apple and not letting me to release it however :(
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
by wodenokoto
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- I love these kinds of articles. Predictions for the future based on nothing more than 5 minutes of surface level contemplation. No sources given.
by mettamage
2 subcomments
- > 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
- 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“.
- 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
Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by jweatherby
0 subcomment
- 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.
- Good luck making your own clone of "simple" file sharing and synchronization app like Google Drive!
- 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?
- As if „deploying“ your app to your iPhone was free…
by weatherlite
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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
- AI is itself a subscription. They ain’t going nowhere…
- > 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.
by jacobjjacob
2 subcomments
- No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that
- That would be awesome. Subscriptions made web development suck. It used to be so fun.
- 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.
- 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
by ivanjermakov
0 subcomment
- "I copied an icon from desktop to a thumb drive to copy the whole program" mindset.
- 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.
- 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.
- Honestly even before AI, open source or other things made it possible to skip a lot of subscriptions
- Only unique data will be worth something.
- 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.
- like how Roombas killed the housekeeping industry ?
- 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.
- One subscription to rule them all.
Subscriptions arnt going away. Software will just be like cable and now streaming.
by informal007
0 subcomment
- 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.
- > 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.
- > 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
- 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.
by adventured
0 subcomment
- 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.
by deafpolygon
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by sergiotapia
0 subcomment
- 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.
- This is yet another fairytale to sell us more “AI” subscriptions.
- 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.
by colesantiago
0 subcomment
- 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.
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