Your app subscription is now my weekend project
rselbach.com211 points by robteix 4 days ago
211 points by robteix 4 days ago
First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free.
Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.
But for an app whose use case doesn’t change and is recurring for no reason? Yeah there’s probably not much value in recurring payments outside of wanting to support the developer. I pay a lot of indie devs out of the goodness of my heart, and I’ll continue to do that.
But the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.
Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess.
Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.
Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
Maybe we should just freeze development in lots of designated areas and declare victory (I know this isn't a practical suggestion, but still...).
Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?
Apple certainly churns APIs quite often. And now my Tahoe install has broken window management, one of the most core features of a modern OS
> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).
Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.
It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.
Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.
It is not irrational on the part of the developer -- I've definitely felt this too. The problem comes from the fact that practically everyone has subscription fatigue these days, and each of us probably has only a few pieces of software we truly care about enough to want to support them out of the goodness of our hearts.
But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
> But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail - the two most important services that control my digital life - are each $60/year, that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. The ones that do are like NextDNS where they cost $20-30 per year because the people running them aren't greedy lemmings trying to pay back VC.
> that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do.
Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value.
And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device.
Gas has a fantastic value, one liter can transport me and my things a long way in short time. So does that mean that I can never buy a bottle of wine or some coffee outside of my home? They are after all liquids, and neither coffee nor wine can compare with the great value of gas.
> Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value.
Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value.
I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not against paying thousands a year in nice fat profit margins if they provide actual value, like a shit ton of GPU compute time or a well made piece of professional software. "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder, but IMO the vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.
Then you cannot ever buy a cup of coffee, because it's also very bad value compared to Fastmail. Or a beer.
> The vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.
Then why are you looking at them,
Spoiler alert: I don’t buy cups of coffee unless it’s on vacation, brewed by a great barista with years of experience. Instead I have a $600 roaster, a $100 burr grinder, and a $10 Turkish coffee pot that have produced many thousands of good cups of coffee over more than a decade. Including the cost of bulk beans, I probably spend about as much on my caffeine addiction as 1password and Fastmail combined. Seems like a decent value to me?
I think your value system is completely broken if you think I can’t have a beer just because they cost more than fastmail. I enjoy having a beer. I don’t enjoy logging into some overpriced SaaS to do something that Claude can do for me now instead.
> Then why are you looking at them,
How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them? Why did you even bother arguing this nonsensical point?
And so the solution is… paying Anthropic $200/mo…
All of the projects OP mentioned could be vibe coded for <$10 worth of GLM-4.7
"Man, it kind of sucks that LLM only does one thing and that my compiled applications stop working after I turn off my LLM service"
37Signals tried that with once.com . Given they're now giving those away for free and haven't said a thing about it suggests it was an abject failure. What you're paying for with SaaS is outsourcing - deployment, maintenance, security, reliability etc are someone else's problem.
The code is the easy part but there's ongoing humans needed to make it work. If Agents get to the point they can genuinely autonomously SRE & patch a service everything changes but that still seems a long way off.
I think that's where technical issues come in. For a web based SaaS app it's not worth the devs time to make multiple versions available. Even for local apps, I would say most of them have some functionality tied to an API and now you're back to running multiple versions of that server.
Even getting an app on the Apple App Store requires a $100/year payment. You either grow users continuously or you ask for a subscription.
How are you completely disregarding the data integrity and privacy aspects of rolling your own tools?
I vibecode an app that only I use and store data locally. That means my data never leaves my device, I never have to share my email with anyone, never have to enter my credit card info anywhere
You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godknows what security practices
That’s worth more than the cost of any tokens
Data privacy is a real concern, but any SaaS provider worth their salt is using Stripe or similar for payments, not rolling their own. That's not as good as not providing the info in the first place but that makes it much less likely that your CC info is going to turn up in an S3 bucket with bad permissions or something.
To my mind, this is the huge bit that should not be overlooked.
So much infrastructure is there to support doing "it" in the Cloud, for all definitions of "it." If we can vibe-code bespoke one-offs to solve our problems, a lot of that Cloud interaction goes away... And that stuff is expensive and complicated.
Hypothetically, open source app stores (I'm counting apt here) address this, but then it's someone else's solution to my problem, which doesn't quite fit my problem perfectly.
This approach to software engineering could be what 3D printing is to tangible artifacts (and I mean that including the limits of 3D printing regarding tangible artifacts, but even still.)
> the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.
It should have been, but the number of people qualified to offer proper scrutiny has been low, and those people have largely been occupied with bigger things. Or they were making those apps and had a conflict of interest.
The point is that now that vibe coding is at a level where it can identify and put together off-the-shelf components, and there are all these end users that don't really care about standardization (it's not like their SaaS products used open, interoperable standards in the first place), the ability to compete with those offerings has exploded.
how do you feel about licensing where you pay once, get the software, and have access to updates for one year?
if you want future updates, you pay for another year of updates (discounted, of course, for loyalty).
or is it more compelling to just have one clean, flat, lifetime rate?
Biggest problem for SaaS is that people don't have enough time to be informed buyers. Like in theory you should be able to make a $0.99 annual SaaS app that provides some small service really well and sell it to a million people who need it, but that kind of sale is almost impossible. Most people are either missing out on great software they should be buying, or paying for software they don't need.
Building (or vibecoding) a markdown editor for a single user and their specific use case, for a 100 users, and for 10,000 users takes different amount of time and effort. In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of users.
Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good at the first glance but get abandoned before they achieve even a 100-users maturity level.
i mean, sure. but the point is, you yourself are often a solo user of these little productivity apps. if you're not using team-based features then a lot of these things aren't worth paying for.
I didn’t mean collaboration features. I clumsily used 10,000-users as a measure of the app completeness.
"10k user completeness" might be full of "features" you don't want that clutter the ui and add entropy.
You know how you think and know your goals so a customized, focused solution would be better than something for the general masses.
Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year. Would we have Claude Code if our foredevelopers hadn’t spent thousands of hours deep in thought, obsessing over every last detail?
Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.
I have no philosophical objection to vibe-coding apps for yourself, but personally, I wouldn’t be 1/10th of the engineer I am if I wasn’t constantly exposed to the work of others.
For some, this trend worries software engineers — who needs software if they can vibe code it themselves? — but I am much more optimistic. I think people will start valuing good software a lot more. Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.
I like to say "my code is 200% vibe-coded; the tricky bit is figuring out which 100% to keep".
Decisions matter, both technical and product ones. LLMs don't make as good technical or product decisions as I would, and the way I work with them tries to maximize my strengths and the LLM's strengths. I don't know if I succeed, but it's better than "make me an app like X" as a prompt.
Your quote caused me to consider vibecoding through the analogy of an LLM-human system as a subtractive synthesizer: the LLM is the oscillator, and the human is the filter.
Making your own software is a good way to escape enshittification and influence.
I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour.
Most apps are very simple and there isn't too much to learn, especially if you're building it to scale to a userbase of yourself. I can't see the need for a ton of CRUD apps which demand subscription fees personally. If you build them yourself, you get to keep your own data, build it out the way you want it, keep it that way, and use computers as a person using a tool as opposed to a customer buying a product.
Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias.
SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management!
Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE.
Insert that quote about how someone will not see the obvious if their paycheck relies on them ignoring the obvious.
Here come LLMs and all they can accomplish with a few arithmetical rules instead of the arbitrary semantics of an SWE; watch as SWEs block social evolution away from disrupting software engineers.
As an example; "protected memory", among many other individual software problems, is an access control problem mired in old semantics relative to OS monoliths.
Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. Technology advancement must now stand still after centuries of evolution? The self selection bias is as obvious as Trump's.
dimator captured the point I was hoping to make, more eloquently than I could hope to. I defer to their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725512
That said, to address your broader point: me, personally, I am thrilled that the barrier to entry for building software has been all but eliminated. The joy of creation belongs to us all.
you couldn't have missed GP's point any more if you tried. ignoring the ad-hominems about SWE greed:
these tools have been trained on decades of people "obsessing over every last detail". what GP is arguing is that we're detaching from that: you prompt, you get something that works, it doesn't matter how it got there. we're now entering the world where the majority of code will be vibed. So whatever our foredevelopers came up with, that will be the the final chapter of craftsman-produced, understood, code. whatever the previous generation actually learned about software engineering, that's at an end too, because why bother learning when i can prompt.
there's no stopping this transition, obviously. the next generation of tools will be trained on the current generation of tools' generated code. we're passed the "termination shock" of sofwtare understanding.
>Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc.
You have to remember that SWE's are the same group that screams "communism" the first moment you mention the word union and they should have the right to make as much money as possible with no restrictions.
This of course leads to the obvious lack of self reflection in their responses when something threatens their future income.
Labor unions align themselves well with Marxist thought and both are pretty based.
I'm not a SWE because I like money. I'm an SWE because I love programming.
"Transportation, like software, is accumulated knowledge. The horse embodied centuries of breeding, training, and hard-won understanding about terrain, endurance, and failure. People learned from the horses they rode. Travel improved through incremental refinement, generation after generation. The automobile didn’t appear in a vacuum.
Building all your transportation yourself—whether by breeding horses or assembling a Model T—cuts you off from that accumulated experience. You lose the benefits of thousands of hours spent by others thinking carefully about the same problems.
I have no objection to Model Ts for personal use, but I wouldn’t be one-tenth the traveler I am without constant exposure to well-bred horses.
Some worry cars make horses obsolete—who needs breeders if anyone can buy an engine? I’m more optimistic. As cars proliferate, people will value good horses more. A Model T gets you the first 90%; it’s the last 90%—judgment, robustness, and adaptability—that differentiates."
The people who pay for the apps vs people vibecode them are largely a different demographic.
Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.
Exactly! It’s like I saw you selling pre-cut fruit for $7 so I decided to cut my own fruit every week.
Linux is free, but it doesn't come bundled with hardware that might not work with it.
I read the same tired opposing arguments all the time; I thought of it the moment I read the title. "My time isn't free, so I'll pay the tax" is true, however most of these individuals spend hours a day watching the news or doing anything else but being productive or spending time with family/friends.
If you aren't working 24/7 while handling a family and telling yourself your time is worth more than a small fee, you are just being lazy. I'm the same way, I am incredibly lazy and will constantly tell myself that my time is worth more. This is usually until I realize I'm spending way to much of my "money" to "save time". HourlyWage(time) = money, if I'm saving time by spending money I'm losing time. This is a basic concept and I defy anyone to show me otherwise.
We live in a time where instant gratification is the main driver behind most decisions, devaluing our currency each and every fee we succumb to... as money is time, and if time is being "saved" by spending time (in the form of money) we are now applying a future debt to the work we are doing today. You might work 40 hours one week, where at least 4 hours of that week goes to paying your streaming bill, another 8 for Internet and Phone, as well as another 2 for the coffee you didn't make that week, another hour for your notetaking app on your phone, 30 minutes for your subscription to watch funny youtuber release content early, another 2 hours for you glut of productivity apps, etc. These things all work to keep you a wage-slave till the day you eventually croak with a menial 401k.
It's embarrassing we reduce ourselves to this.
Get a better hourly wage. About an hour of my month pays for all of my entertainment and software subscriptions. Another couple of hours pay for a year of iPhone. Coffee? Another hour per month maybe? We are worlds apart in our arithmetic and I don't even earn that much.
If people enjoy spending their unpaid hours building clones of paid software that's fine, but it's fine because they enjoy it. It's not minimally worth it. The time I waste on YouTube and the news etc etc is sorely needed and enjoyed downtime. If someone has enough energy to build instead of vegetating, more power to them. I prefer to save my energy for the stuff I value. (Which is actual work, helping family and games)
EDIT: another thing to consider is that each hour I spend fully pursuing my occupation pays me an hourly wage but also pays me in career growth. This compounds massively over time in higher and higher wages. Building throwaway apps generally does not. Why would I waste energy on work that doesn't compound? I'm all for serendipity but not as a financial argument.
> And then on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, I vibecoded Jabber.
Might have a bit of difficulty naming it that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org).
Edit: I apparently wasn't at all the first to think of this (https://github.com/rselbach/jabber/issues/5).
> Reel does exactly what I wanted Loom to do: I can record my camera, I can move it around, and I get to trim the video after it’s done (I don’t remember being able to do that with Loom).
But that’s not what Loom is about.
It’s about streaming the video.
Before:
Capture something with likes of quicktime.
Transcode it so that it doesn’t take a few gigabytes. This takes considerable time and resources (though OBS can do it while recording, not after).
Upload somewhere to share. Wait while it is uploading.
Loom takes care of all those steps so when you press stop you can immediately share the link with someone.
—
Hope other use-cases in the article are not as misrepresented as this one
Loom does also have a trim and edit after recording feature, I use it all the time
> I’m often asked to make small videos showing some support agent how something works
Fwiw, Google has had a free in-browser tool for this for ages, makes capture really simple on any device with a browser: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/
Zapier also has a free product which works well - https://zapier.com/zappy
I made the same realization two weeks ago. Posted about it here, where I rebuilt bare bones todoist with a habit tracker, goal setting and more within a few vibe coding sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633092
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).
> But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.
I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to write software, even with LLMs, and use it in production. The average computer user does not even use a computer as their primary computing device, they use a phone. The barrier to going from idea to phone app on iPhone or Android is relatively high.
Todo list apps, habit trackers, and the like are almost a special snowflake breed. Almost everyone has some different cross-section of needs they care about, and no app is perfect for each individual. So it's natural to say "is there something that matches what I want?" and then reach for tools to make that. The world is your oyster for todo list apps. Of course, the real issue comes from data sovereignty, trust, quality, things like that. When Apple launches a new device or a new iOS feature people want, you get to see which apps will actually implement the new features or which stagnate. They're a natural avenue for vibe coding since they're so particular.
Depends on how you define "production".
People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore.
All it needs is the maker mindset of being just lazy enough to be bothered by a repetitive task and the courage (and permission) to use an Agentic LLM to figure out a fix for the issue.
Eh, that really depends on how well the LLM understands edge cases of the particular need. Quite often these cases are hidden deep in files nobody understands any longer and will never get in a training set.
You end up with a system that works right up to the moment it doesn't and fails spectacularly and expensively.
This is one of those reasons you always hear about sweeping medical/hospital records systems being upgraded going tens or hundreds of millions over budget. The edge cases are demons.
Well of-fucking-course you don't vibe code your salary management system =)
Just normal non-coder jobs have massive amounts of repetitive crap that could easily be automated - and already has been automated with Excel - to a degree.
Now Agentic AI lets them automate the rest - or if they're real smart they use an agentic AI model and create an application to do it that doesn't require a LLM subscription.
It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.
It's somewhat like the Shortcuts system on steroids.
> It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.
It would be interesting, particularly for Apple, as this would cannibalize fees charged on the App Store. I imagine they could charge for use of the vibe-coding platform, but Apple hasn't been great at figuring out LLMs.
It would be cool if 3rd partly app platform could provide this functionality, but as I noted in another comment, I cannot even install my own vibe-coded apps to my own iPhone. (Without the 100 USD a year developer tax.) So I'm not sure how the architecture would work on iOS.
Yeah. Part of why this is possible is simply that there are tons of subscription apps out there that were never really justified in requiring a recurring payment and are actually fairly trivial.
It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that.
I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.
Was reminiscing about the early iOS App Store days when many apps were free and often hobby projects. Some hooked up google ads to make a nice easy profit if they stumbled on a particularly good early app idea. I don't really find apps like that anymore, or at least they don't really get shared the same way. Maybe this is a return to that in a sense.
I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.
What I fear is a pollution of the open source space with tons of tailored apps that have a lot of overlap, but none of them get meaningful contributions because the maintainer will most likely respond with wontfix to almost everything (if they respond at all).
I build in the open, but what I build is just for me. If someone wants to fork it and modify it, they can go ahead - pretty much all of my stuff is MIT licensed by default.
But I'm not going to start adding features to my bespoke utility to fix someone else's problem.
Shrug, it's hard to have an open app where everyone wants to add/change something and not have it turn into a Turing machine that attempts to do everything.
Sometimes you just want an app does X and Y, but not A, B and Z.
The "Your" shouldn't have been stripped from the title IMHO.
Depending on how you read the owner of an app subscription (the provider or the subscriber) maybe 'My' is better.
I own a number of brands that sell on Amazon, and I've always used an app called HighFive that automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you bought (without it you have to click a button on each order to send it).
It's always been free, but because of a change to the way Amazon charges third party app devs, they were going to start charging next month. Since the whole app is just a couple of API calls and storing a record of which orders you've sent the request to already, Claude Code built it in 5 minutes.
In general, the Amazon Seller UI is a cluster (especially since I have one account for each brand, so I constantly have to switch between them). There are lots of subscription apps to make your Amazon data more useful and accessible, but Claude Code with access to the Amazon APIs pretty much replaces all of them. I spend very little time in the actual Amazon UI now and mostly just ask my trusty assistant for the info that I need.
The vibe-coding part is most in discussion here, so it's easy to overlook the financial part.
I build small web applications for my personal needs all the time by just regular programming, and I'm saving so much money by using them and not some proprietary app. Not even mentioning the advantages that it is completely bespoke, runs local and gives me peace of mind data-wise.
Some wise man once said that personal computers are a bicycle for the mind. Programming your own programs is the most pure way you train on that bicycle.
I think it depends on the project size and how much your time is worth. Vibe coding might be able to save some time, depending on how well it can solve the problem without needing correction.
As a rebuttal to “SaaS is still cheaper!” - I like this because it makes coding more of a personal and enjoyable hobby. It also is empowering to the creator and gives them ownership of their creations and what their creations create
This is a fun article and approach.
Subscription apps often have to target a wide userbase. However, most users only need a small subset of the entire feature set, and would be better served by a tailored version. This means that vibecoded apps can get away with being much less complex (specific featureset, no login etc), while still being more useful.
I have also created tools with LLMs that are exactly tailored to what I need, and still much more polished than what I could do without LLMs. Will have to think about if there is anything else I can do this with.
I had to download file attachments from a specific niche web forum that's behind login. I could've went looking for a browser plugin or a 3rd party tool to do it.
Once again, it took me about an hour while watching my shows to get a custom one made.
The first version operated by me downloading the pages one by one to a directory, the Python app parsed the html, downloaded the files and renamed according to thread name.
After a few iterations the tool just grabs a cookies.txt file exported from Firefox and can take any thread URL, browse through it, skipping existing files and determining if everything is already downloaded
I could easily have it just watch a set of threads for new content and download automatically, but the current system is fine =)
That’s pretty great, I’ve done something similar by hand many moons ago. It was very tedious.
I need a simple S3 compatible API to store some files with basic auth and ssl certs using let’s encrypt. Nothing crazy, Garage is overkill, Minio is overkill. I may see if Claude code can handle that for me using python or something.
/btw, I work in consulting and the above project would have a budget of probably $100k and a schedule of 3 months. I see a lot of change for swe consultants coming.
Lower the barrier to MVP while raising the bar on the level of quality that warrants MRR. Rising tides and all..
I can hire a contractor to build a carport, or whack one together with some supplies from the Big Box store. More roofs being built with more price points to serve the market.
I like this approach, at least for personal apps. I have started doing this myself, which also led into me learning to use LLMs better and more productively.
The other side of the coin however is a potential decline in indie hacker products.
There's only 50 weekends in a year. And there's a limited amount of years. I'd rather pay $10 and spend the weekend sailing.
> There's only 50 weekends in a year.
That's sad for you. Do you spend the other two weekends dead for tax purposes?
I'm doing something very similar (creating my own apps for personal use), but I'm creating iOS apps primarily.
Here's what bugs me: I cannot permanently install my apps to my iPhone because of Apple's walled garden. I need to reinstall every 7 days and constantly re-confirm that I am a "Trusted" developer.
I know I can pay Apple 100 USD a year for a developer account, but I bought this phone outright 7 years ago, I own it. (Obviously, I clearly don't in this case.) /rant
I had never written an iOS app until a couple months ago and was initially very put off when I hit the same wall. The alternative is to host on a cheap VPS and find some way to prevent other people from using your app. When you cost it out, it's close enough to the 100 bucks a year for the Apple account. However, the kicker for me is the side loading process. Way too much headache compared to a deploy script that has my changes running nearly instantly.
Are you using features that can't be replicated with a PWA?
I actually created a PWA first, but it was just even more rough around the edges than the vibe-coded iOS app.
I wanted something that felt like an app, so would use iOS design elements, have widgets, use on-device storage (for offline use), etc. Apple, very intentionally I believe, makes a lot of these things harder than they need to be.
Which is exactly why whenever I have an idea I just tinked with ClaudeCode for an hour or so until I have exactly what I need. It takes less time than trying to compare 10 similar products, none of which have the exact specifications or features that I need.
List of projects mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716805
This reminds me so much of Maggie Appleton blog post on "Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers" [1]
We have so many people who are so excellent and fast and developing nowadays that we can even afford the time to build things for our community, friends and even just for ourselves.
It has probably always been like this, but I am just personally observing a higher-degree of people doing and talking about it. Even just the small-web/neocities bobble points into this.
I get that this is tempting but it just means you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix. And disaster recovery is most certainly a manual task.
> you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix
If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it.
Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.
Right but most of the time, in my experience they keep the lights on.
Keeping the lights on is fine.
But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back.
If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it.
If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this.
If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this.
Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.
Yep. At one point I expected the software I needed to work for a reasonable time range, possibly up to a decade. Best if you could buy it once and use it from then on.
Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.
Why wouldn't I be able to fix these things? If I managed to build a thing from scratch (with Opus 4.5), I don't see why I wouldn't be able to fix it and maintain it in the future (maybe with Opus 4.7 or even better future models?).
Why would they "eventually break"?
In what situation would a simple script or helper app just suddenly rot away and stop working?
Of course it's POSSIBLE to vibe together a massive monstrosity of an everything-app, but that's not what the author is doing here (nor me).
If you build enough things, you will also gain the experience to fix those things
> Then just yesterday, a friend of mine was telling me how he got tired of paying for Typora and decided to vibecode his own Markdown editor
But typora is actually one time purchase and one of the rare apps that is priced well with good business model.
They have probably best RTL support and I wanted like your friend to write my own focused markdown editor with RTL support using clause and made some progress but realized that the time and cost of doing this is not worth it. I just paid typora a week ago for $15.
But I understand the point and I use Claude to hack together personal tools all the time.
Yeah, I was confused by that as well. Typora is sold as a perpetual license for 3 devices at $15. I don't understand why their friend would be tired of paying for it.
Turning a paid sub like WisprFlow into your own weekend build (Jabber) is a great move, but you can take it further by finding open-source alternatives that already implement the features you're replicating. For dictation and speech-to-text like what WisprFlow does, there's Handy[0], a free, open-source, offline speech-to-text app that runs locally with Whisper models.
Once you identify something like Handy, instruct Claude to study how that OSS project actually builds the feature and adapt the logic to your stack. AI is really good at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and understanding the full implementation.
The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces and don't capture everything otherwise. That's what I'm working on at opensource.builders[1]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook of features you can remix across stacks, with structured "skills" that point to the exact details so the porting works reliably.
So basically steal code from OSS, oh no I meant "get inspired by" OSS code without actually contributing anything. This is just gross as a developer imo.
For most OSS code there is no responsibility to share your changes when you're not distributing them to other people. More so there are plenty of OSS licences that simply allow other people to do just this.
We're big believers in personal software: even with OSS alts existing, building your own in your stack is valuable. Before AI, you'd read code from other apps, understand the implementation, and reimplement it yourself. This just makes that easier and faster.
My projects (Openship/Openfront[0]) are the first on the chopping block. We're creating modular OSS alts for every vertical (barbershops, hotels, etc.) for folks to take, remix, adapt, or fork into their tools. Chances are your AI model is already trained on similar OSS and building from it anyway. We make finding the exact code reliable. Check out our ethos to learn more [1].
> I’m still skeptical of vibecoding in general. As I mentioned above, I would not trust my vibecoding enough to make these into products.
That’s the whole point - there’s no need for it to be a product when you can do it yourself, and it’s the death knell of products like this.
Also you dont need the architecture to scale to millions of users. So it can be a bit more rough and OK to be inefficient.
And you don't need to build in user management, Stripe integration for payments, build a landing page, advertise it or anything.
You can just use it and be content.
>user management, Stripe integration for payments
FWIW, `better-auth` solves that and LLMs know how to integrate it.
This is the same for me and I've not written code for years since I was a kid in school.
I vibe coded a webapp that I was paying yearly for and the version I made does everything I wish the app I paid for did as it's 100% personalised to me.
I've been thinking for awhile that this is going to be the future and I'm already starting to think of more things I will create.
can you share which paid webapp you were using and maybe a link to your version's github?
The App was TeuxDeux.
I haven't published it publicly yet, as i use it personally and it's a little flakey still, but will look to do in the future once I finish adding all the features.
My version is much more feature rich than TeuxDeux and I made it for Free in Google AI studio over the past two months, between other things. I'd just type a prompt and then go do some other stuff, it has taken quite a lot of revision but I haven't written a single line of code and i've been using it daily to manage my tasks since the start of December.
For me it makes sense because coding agents have made software development fun again, so I do more of that than playing games or surfing the Internet.
I see the sceptical comments, but no one says this "vibe-coded" projects/apps/tools will be ready for your customers. It basically scratches the itch for the given users/company/whatever. Also, it doesn't have to be fast, stable or handle 1_000_000 concurrent users. You don't have to worry about that.
Not everything has to be a SaaS, but I don't think all SaaS apps can be vibe-coded to a weekend project.
If it is solving my issues and problems, why do preaching about the merits of a proper product or paying. I'll pay for what I see value in, and vibe-code where I don't see the benefit of paying.
Maybe I miserably fail and get back to paying to product. It's all good, I take that responsibility while I start my vibe-coding session.
I was hoping that the current LLM/Agent/Vibecoding wave would lead to a revival of open source contributions, but I am not sure that is happening yet
The incentive for sending in patches was that you needed to fix a bug in software you were using for your own use case, so you might as well send the authors the patch, and they'd keep maintaining it all for you. But if you can vibe-code your own solution, you don't need to use somebody else's software, so the patch doesn't get made, much less submitted.
The other thing is, LLMs tend to generate terrible code that pisses off open-source maintainers. So I'm not sure even LLM-made patches will make it into open source much.
This might be the death of traditional open source. Vibe-coded-only open source may be the next generation. Which I'm fine with, as long as we can start regulating software, so that vibe-coded tools are banned for safety/privacy uses unless they follow a software building code.
I think it's happening, some of them are even making it to the front page of HN, like the "I built 50 calculators" a few days ago. I'm still working to release some of the things I've built over the last month:
- A nice little single-file web "random slideshow" to replace an aging one I bought. - A fairly feature-complete read-only SQL console. - A development SMTP server (like Mailhog) https://github.com/linsomniac/smtphotel - A work status dashboard that I'll probably release once I have run it a bit longer. - A fairly extensive Docusign-like webapp. - A retrospective meeting runner. - A cron "swiss army knife" helper. - A "social calorie tracker" (I'm unhappy with the existing ones out there).
These are all things I've vibecoded in the last month, and are more than I could have coded in my spare time in 6 months or more.
For me, the renaissance is here.
I am finding the same thing! I used to use a window management tool long ago called something like Zooom (it lets you press hotkeys and it 'picks up' your window and you can easily move it around). I fell in love with it like 20 years ago, but it was barely maintained. Someone then created a similar app called Hummingbird - which was great, but it had some issues and again maintainability wasn't great.
So I decided to vibecode an app for myself and wouldn't you know? It took me a few hours and it's INCREDIBLE! No more relying on someone else to maintain something, I can simply build my own solutions, whenever I want!
This hits close to home. I've been building tools for bookkeepers and accountants as a side project, and the calculus you're describing - where a subscription becomes a weekend obligation - is exactly why I've tried to keep things genuinely useful rather than sticky.
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.
I doubt LLM-generated software is going to replace more traditional software any time soon, especially when accuracy is pretty important (such as accounting). One thing I learned from years as a PM in a very data-centric organization is understanding data, how it is generated/stored/cut/etc. is very important to getting accurate results.
Where I could see some really interesting results is the marriage of the two. For example, you have a solid data structure that an LLM can generate infinite custom views from.
https://www.databricks.com is doing this already with data as well as multiple other companies
And I have first hand knowledge of well-known companies building their own tooling because the SaaS offerings have a bad price/feature ratio.
i think the same, i think backend where data is more prominent is not going anywhere soon. llms produce very bad data structures.
but from good apis, good data, good interface they can generate quite nice frontends.
i guess, frontend as job is going to have a hard time.
also, writing code is not cognitive load, its always reading code. and llms just increase that. so i mostly try to avoid using them.
but i do like researching with them. context free. like googles ai mode, etc. not from my code editor cause then they get biased and suggest stupid sh8t all the time.
You can pivot your knowledge into building bespoke tools for the same people, just a LOT faster.
The recommendation thing is a nice benchmark, but if you're building hyper-specific tools - why would people recommend them to anyone? If you build a tool for an accountant that does some very niche thing only they're bothered by, why would they recommend to the analyst or receptionist in the company?
I’ve been doing something similar and thinking about this in the last 6 months or so. It’s pretty crazy.
It’s easy to overlook what I think is the real value of these “home-built” tools.
We can now produce products and apps that are tailored to our own preferred ways of working.
Regardless of the cost of generating them (which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription) or the effort involved (sometimes less than an hour of “vibe coding”), we’ve reached a point where the resulting product can be significantly more valuable than the existing product, service, or subscription it replaces.
So tired of these posts about people jerking themselves off over how good they are because they used AI to shit out some trivial bullshit. Like, I'm glad you're saving time and money. That's what AI now does. It's what millions of other engineers here --already know--. But why do we have to know about it? Is it remotely noteworthy or unexpected? Why does HN continue to upvote this self-serving, gratuitous, bullshit? Do you guys want HN to look like OP for the next [however long] this AI hype cycle takes to reach saturation (probably another 5 years at this point.) Even the biggest AI soyboy will be sick of it by then.
I've been using a Wispr equivalent I made myself since 2023. It's wild to me that people pay for it, and I've wondered if I should try to monetize what I use. It is not as slick and polished, but provides essentially the same service: better speech-to-text than the built-in speech-to-text for Macs.
Loved the article, thanks for sharing. I’m curious if you’d share your setup. I haven’t made any macOS apps before, primarily because I never wanted to really learn XCode and obj-c. I like swift but still prefer simpler editors like Zed/VSC vs. What XCode offers.. so when you’re building these are you doing it in XCode or in another tool like Claude Code/codex/gemini CLI?
cheers
Seconded, I would be interested in knowing people's workflows + experiences developing MacOS and iOS apps with claude, etc.
From the repo here, it looks like its just using swift command line tools, which might just work well enough with cursor/vscode/etc. for small projects. You won't have Xcode's other features but maybe thats fine for an agentic-first development workflow.
Not OP, but I use Xcode with Claude Pro and it is going fairly well. I also am creating my own personal-use apps instead of paying for monthly subscriptions. I know a bit of Swift, and had been trying to learn it while also using LLMs. At this point, I've decided to also not make these real projects and just vibe-code exactly what I want.
Excellent! I've done the same thing. Five prompts to have a working iOS app that solves my problem.
As a non iOS user wouldn't be the hard part getting it on the phone? The last time I checked you would still need apple hardware and 100$ per year for the developer license or something like that.
Technically you can upload it to your phone for free, but you have to re-upload it every seven days, which makes it pretty frustrating.
Software itself is not inherently valuable, the value is in running and maintaining its data and any necessary integrations to other systems.
The bar for me to pay for a $10/month software subscription is pretty high, but once I make the decision that it's valuable, the actual cash cost is pretty low. Vibe coding something will never approach the quality of something that someone put enough thought and effort to turn into a product. The main place where I'll write my own software is when it's truly custom to my own needs, AI is a force multiplier for this type of work, but at the end of the day I still have very limited time to run and maintain a lot of custom software and data, so it's not going to cannibalize any of the SaaS I'm willing to pay for.
Obviously for younger software guys with more time than money, the equation will be different, but those were never the make-or-break demographic for SaaS anyway. I don't think the equation has meaningfully changed for SaaS sales due to AI, I see it more as continuously rising bar over the last two decades due to UX expectations, market saturation, limits on human attention and complexity tolerance.
Good. Good good good. More of this.
I feel like if e.g. Hypercard had lived, this would be a more defacto mode of doing things.
So if you can get a good LLM model locally in say 6 months, you may never pay for any subscriptions. Only companies will remain will be old behemoths whose software is contractually bought by other big enterprises.
Other thing I have experienced is my standards have changed a lot, now for $10 subscription I need a lot more, not just some simple editor or a small todolist would suffice anymore. I am not thinking about paying for new software, and in fact I am getting completely burnt out by all the sites looking the same.
I keep seeing versions of this soliloquy on here, sometimes multiple times every day. They make fine blog posts, it's something to say and something to read, but ultimately remind me more of piling into a Tiktok trend than anything else: everybody's doing it, so I will too!
End of the day, much like when photography went digital (and smartphones got good cameras), yes, there were a LOT more photos taken, but the relative proportion of outsized, lauded photographers remained fairly constant. The upshot is that WAY more people are exposed to the possibility of creating excellence than before, the downside is the market gets flooded with utility and mediocrity. Said excellence never goes away, and the same will apply to software.
The very idea that SaaS (or packaged software, or whatever) "will die" because "anybody" can prompt their way to a "personal tool" (as a mainstream exercise) is so far-fetched to me because the only people who will prompt their way to a tool ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
Professionals who need functionality will always pay for it.
Boomer dads who can barely work a DVR will always pay for it.
Business owners who need less friction and more reliability will always pay for it.
IMO, this "I'll just replace Salesforce with my own personal CRM for $200 for a month of Claude" thing is just a hobbyist's pipe dream lol -- not that there's anything wrong with it, some people will do it, but, man, there's a reason that Netflix is Netflix, and Plex isn't Netflix.
Most small businesses don’t need the complexity of Salesforce and people use Netflix for the content, not the software.
I don’t understand why Netflix needs 3500 engineers. They built what needed to be built already.
Just sucks that instead of buying a piece of software now we're going to send $100/mo to an AI giant so we can build our own crappier bespoke apps.
This is where claude code is so good because all the stuff AI is bad at - security, auth, storage - are not a problem if its just you using it locally
Whats the future of being able to make money selling software with these changes?
I'm surprised people were paying for software like this, and with subscriptions no less.
Yes, the options presented were overpay for something or roll your own. Could you not try to find a better alternative first?
Yeah, a little bespoke editor is exactly the kind of thing I'd've been happy to fork over a one-time cost for, but never a subscription. Interesting!
why even pay for that, just use a free model from Opencode, most of them are pretty good for simple tasks. I haven't paid a cent in vibe coding for ages.
I've been evangelizing vibe coding, because we are wielding something much more powerful now than even ~3 months prior (Nov was the turning point).
Now that Prometheus (the myth, not the o11y tool) has dropped these LLMs on us, I've been using this thought experiment to consider the multi-layered implications:
In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food?
Has anyone tried, on a large scale, designing the architecture of an application or writing behavioral tests (which effectively is designing the app through testing) and given the LLM the task of writing the implementation details?
Does that work better for maintainability than letting it decide on its own what the architecture should look like?
If so, what is your setup/workflow?
I did this recently at the company I work at. Someone suggested GitBook, I 'Vibe coded' an internal docs website in under and hour. Does what we need, looks good. Unless the app has a large community/network and is just a SaaS with some offering, it'll be very easy to replace it.
It's interesting, because a few years ago I would have put this strictly under the "not invented here" fallacy, where we'd now be stuck maintaining another project for the foreseeable future. I used to press pretty hard to avoid it.
Now I wonder if the maintenance cost for this type of internal system has gone down to a level where that is no longer an issue.
I can see it going both ways. If knowledge work continues to roughly look the way it looks then I think maintenance is going to be an issue. Both in terms of keeping the spaghetti together but also in terms of all the bad design decisions you get from everyone bolting on their ideas. If however knowledge work becomes just talking to LLMs and occasionally interacting with an on the fly generated UI then maintenance becomes a non issue
We're currently paying through the nose for a shitty intranet solution that could've been just hugo with a markdown editor.
Or a vibe-coded simple website.
But "designed and implemented company-wide intranet" looks good in someone's CV so here we are.
The prevalence of this "personal vibecoded app" spirit makes me start to wonder if an "App" is the right level of abstraction for packaging capabilities. Perhaps we need something more "granular".
what is reel doing for osx that quicktime screen recording isnt getting you?
I should vibecode my own Onshape.
By the same logic it was one git clone away.
And one day your day job will be someone else weekend project
Only assuming a sufficient number of your customers is happy and capable to vibe-code a product for their set of the requirements that your product solves.
Some apps just do not make any sense for monetization and are now raced to zero. If it's not already open sourced then someone will vibe-code an implementation if none exist.
Vibe-coding accelerates the destruction of basic (closed-source) apps charging a subscription for features that offer little to no value whatsoever.
The SaaS business model took things too far anyway. Everything is a subscription and it gets tiring quickly. I am glad that LLMs can replace crappy SaaS with crappy code now.
I replaced a whole bunch of these with one shot prompts for shits and giggles.
I think there's still an underestimated burden to vibe-coding an app for a non-software engineer. I'm not recommending my parents vibe-code apps to solve problems, so I think the market is smaller.
But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.
I'm currently assisting three very non-programmer people in-house who did just this.
Their problem is solved, now it's up to me to update the internal guidelines and agent instructions so that the code is at least semi-decent.
None of these are going to "production", they all live on local company controlled laptops and only one of them might access an external API automatically later this spring.
But each of them takes hours of manual work and does it in minutes.
With the current tech, I agree this will still be pretty niche. I'm vibe-coding my own iOS apps, and it still needs a decent understanding of the tech and a willingness to put up with a lot of rough edges.
However, with a proper framework (e.g., a very opinionated design system, the ability to choose from some pre-designed structures/flows, etc.) I could very much see ad hoc creation of software becoming more widespread.
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Thats not cheaper than paying a subscription. In fact this is at least 3x-10x more expensive.
And this is comparing to being subscribed many years in a row. With SaaS you can unsub and sub only when you need it again.
With your side project - a weekend of your life is invested and you will never get it back.
This is the worst use of your time if you measure it in $. If you make it for fun - sure. In all other terms it is a complete loss.
$20 claude code subscription for a month can replace the $15 + $10 for each month. How is that 3x more espensive? The user just saved $280 per year, on just two subscriptions alone.
Hardly doubt that this was the 'most waste of ones time'. For one, it's not like most of us can decide to "work" for 3-5 hours on a Saturday and get any money. I play games on my pc while claude codes for me. I alt tab each few minutes and see if it needs any input. Then I can (not that I do it), read and perhaps learn from the code.
Hey, CC has a way to trigger a notification chime on completion.
(How? Idk, I just asked it to guide me through the short hook process)
Afaik it's built in now.
I get a notification on macOS with the title of the context.
Yup. thats more expensive because each hour of your time is at least 50USD And each hour on weekend that you would have spent with your family etc is probably 500-1000 usd at least, so yeah, it is much cheaper to pay 15 usd for SaaS
I must admit that I find this thread very funny. "Spend $200 a month so that you can waste a weekend to make a shitty clone of a SaaS app so that you can save $10" is... somewhat questionable, as far as sensible decisions go. Some people even seem to assume that this is a death kneel of the entire saas app industru, since everybody can just vibe code an inferior knockoff of bejeweled or whatever.
It just boggles he mind how divorced from reality some people are. You could offer $fotm_ai_model with infinite usage, free apple developer account (since you're apparently replacing everything you have with homegrown stuff) and the amount of people wasting their weekends on vibe-cloning their own custom apps would still approximate to zero. This doesn't even get to the fact that the majority of apps already HAVE a free alternative, and it's certainly far less effort to replace increasingly obnoxious apple music with foobar than to build, test and then permanently support your own music player. You also probably want claude code 15 to replace anything non-trivial, otherwise, well, good luck.
I don’t think I’d bother even if my weekend had ten times as many hours as it does, and I’m a code monkey that still mostly enjoys his job.
> I would never sell it as a product
I wonder why people still hold a lot of stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM.
I don't think it is "a stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM." I think the author is coming at it in the same way I do with some similar tools: "this is good enough for me, I am the end user, and I don't have the time or desire to iron out a bunch of edge cases or make things for more than one user."
I am rewriting my website. I was using a converted Pelican template. I started the rewrite using variables similar to the template, then about halfway through, I realized, "this is dumb. I am the only user. I care about nobody else. I can hardcode nearly all of this, and if I want a change, change the hardcoded name." An example of this was various social media names.
I have scripts that convert color themes for applications from more popular themes to a theme I particularly like. I hard-coded the input colors and output colors. I could have made a config file, etc, but, that adds complexity and, more importantly *I do not care about other users.*
There is a huge leap between "good enough for me to use for exactly my use case" and release or sell as a product.