Unless there is inherent complexity in the problem (and assuming subscriptions don’t get pricey soon) I can see nontechnical people getting into designing their own apps.

It makes me think of 3d printing. A lot of people got into 3d modeling because of it. And a lot of people publish cute baubles 3d models (analogous to vibe coded ai wrappers?) but there is genuinely useful stuff that people not in the fabrication or 3d design industry create and share, some even making money off of it.

I just can’t think of a way saas margins will stay as high as they are now.

Most of the problems you talk about are problems if you intend your software to be used at scale.

If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?

People used to do this in an Excel sheet.

Now they can ask Claude to make them a nice UI similar to MFP or whatever.

Data can be stored in a single JSON file.

It's going to take years before they see actual performance issues.

And even though it becomes an issue, right now an AI Agent can already provide a fix and a script to migrate the data.

My only concern really is about security.

But a private VPS only reachable through Tailscale and they're ahead of 99% of the rest.

Personally, for my small business. I've replaced £500 Zapier subscription, £100 Todoist subscription, and I only haven't replaced the rest because I feel like there's not a huge rush. And it's been six months and nothing has fallen apart yet.

You might not think small business is relevant, but it absolutely is.

I think this is great for everyone to be a developer, the gatekeeping has now been removed and we will see a creative explosion of apps that everyone can build.

The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.

Unless you had an AI write the article, you can't possibly know that. I'm sick of this being randomly thrown around: it's basically mentioned for every article posted. Sometimes the author chimes in to say that no, they wrote it themselves. Other times sure, the article was written by AI. I don't know, and you don't know either.

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.

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.

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

Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.

As many have said, making stuff isn't the hard part. Making good stuff is the hard part.

Your point is based on wrong assumptions.

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.

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.

My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.

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.

[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545

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.

App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?

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.

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.

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.

Probably wouldn't be a bad thing.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution is awesome, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's now possible. But what I've found is that even with AI assistance, there are so many interconnected decisions that make this more than a one-shot prompt project.

I pushed for us to build a mobile app specifically to take advantage of portability (use it at home for planning, at the store for shopping) and the camera (image recognition with OpenAI and scanning barcodes with expo-camera). That sounds simple, but it cascades into hundreds of UX decisions about offline-first architecture, gesture patterns, camera permissions, and more.

The units and quantities problem mentioned in this thread is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to figure out a data model that mirrors how people naturally think about groceries: how they categorize items, how they plan meals versus staples versus impulse buys, how they track what's running low. Modeling those mental models is genuinely hard.

What helps is that I worked as an ecommerce shopper at Whole Foods, and I learned that stores are meticulously organized with numbered bays and predetermined routes optimized for efficiency. Translating that knowledge into a system that can intelligently sort a shopping list based on store layout (which varies by location!) and typical shopping patterns is genuinely complex.

One of my teammates put it well: this is a simple idea, but it requires a level of care, expertise, and experience to get it right. AI's incredibly helpful for implementing solutions once we've made these decisions, but the decisions themselves require domain knowledge, user research, and taste. That's the part that's hard to automate, and it's what makes this a real engineering project rather than a weekend Claude experiment.

I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It's the kind of thing that would be incredibly difficult to scale but works just fine when you only have one user. No SaaS grocery app can hope to compete with me being able to tailor my own shopping list app to my exact preferences.

For anyone without dev or product experience, getting beyond a basic feature set and keeping it running reliably (or roll it out to > 1 user) is still a massive challenge.

Think Vercel, Supabase, et al. Because most of the time agents prefer glueing together managed services than building from scratch, unless they're told otherwise.

And if I'm someone building a custom in-house solution to replace a SaaS subscription product, I'm going to pay lower managed costs without blinking.

Good riddance to software subscriptions.

I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).

Whether it made sense for you is mostly irrelevant. The question is whether it worked for the developer. You can read endless complaints about Adobe's subscription model but the profits kept rolling in.

Reasons why subscriptions may be a "better" than upfront licenses, even when the subscription cost more in the long run:

1. Cashflow management

2. Bypass budget approvals due to smaller amounts

More people with more agents freely contributing more to even more concentrated and scaled-up projects.

Those agents will get more potent. The projects can get more ambitious.

One user with N Claude usage. 100 users with 100x the Claude usage. Who can build the superior product? If you put the right structure on it, the 100x wins by a drastic margin. Those 100x Claudes benefit in combination courtesy of the open source effect, their potential additive value is greatly enhanced.

The 1x outcome will end up being relegated to triviality (the one page homepage as website). The bar is about to be raised really, really, really high in software if you want to be relevant. This is merely a very short transition period.

>This also got me thinking about open source might be dying.

Just because you can generate a wrapper app for a very specific use-case doesn't mean open source is dead or dying. As if open source was all just about people sharing their crappy specific use-case apps.

And software isn't getting weird. A part of the software development life cycle is being automated.

Automation of easy templated tasks will cause a huge disruption. Production of software used to be a skilled job, but now is automated to a large degree. This has huge impacts to the profession as a whole. Already, enrollment to the UC CS program is declining.