It seems like what this will basically entail is a US algorithm and moderation system, while the core app remains with ByteDance.
> The Joint Venture will secure U.S. apps through software assurance protocols, and review and validate source code on an ongoing basis, assisted by its Trusted Security Partner, Oracle.
So the new team will be in charge of content moderation, training, and "review and validat[ion]" of source code. Not actually a new app.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, try again with a different change, and repeat until they get what they want.
Good luck asking an LLM to modify something made by a different LLM 5 years ago.
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 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.
> It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.
They could have done a low-code/no-code platform ages ago, but they didn't. They don't want their users creating their own apps instead of buying, because that would cannibalise their income from hopeful app devs selling 5 units at a 30% cut.
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.
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
> 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
I'm speaking more about fake SaaS "we have an app and we charge monthly for it and license it." Obviously, a tool with cloud-based storage and sharing will be a different beast.
But do you trust a vibe coded app to do cloud-based storage and sharing better than a company or an indie developer? If you need these functions (like sharing a todo list between two users), you have a lot more concerns than "does it boot".
If I vibe coded it? Absolutely. I can definitively answer what S3 buckets are in use, and that public access is disabled! Like, that parts really really not that hard, and people keep fucking it up. Plus the threat model for the Todo so that my small friends/family group uses is totally different from the problems google keep faces.
But that's cheating because I do this stuff professionally. Would I trust a vibe coded Todo app my uncle's son Jimmy who smoke a lot of pot uses? I'm not saving my bank account number to it, but I'd have no problem using it for reminders that my aunt's birthday is coming up so I need to buy a gift. If it gets popular within in the family unit, uncle will have me talk to his son and take a deep look at it anyway, try and encourage Jimmy to go back to school and look for a job and all that stuff too.
Plus, theres nothing stopping the company and indie developer from vibecoding as well.
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.)
Another way to look at this is that you're giving away all of your source code as context, and probably a lot of things you don't necessarily want to share, if you aren't using self-hosted models.
Especially with agents that slurp up files, have access to databases, etc. You're literally giving access to your computer, your network and your data to third parties and letting them run code.
My take is that the kind of SaaS you're likely to replace with a vibecoded local setup are unlikely to be anything overly complicated or proprietary. Think of all the timers and todos and note organization apps you use - nothing particularly complicated or esoteric about the code itself.
What is valuable is the data you store in these things. Ergo, it makes more sense to vibecode these because the code is routine, but the data you save in them is worth protecting
During development you don't use prod data, though. So I don't see much problem here, even if I'm developing something where I would store sensitive data later.
(If there is a bug though which I would want to debug and if I were not a developer, then your concerns are more valid)
> During development you don't use prod data, though.
I’ve seen projects where testing is done in prod and also projects where API keys for some external services (e.g. Mapbox) are shared across prod and dev. Or cases where credentials end up in Git repos (edit: wrote GitHub originally, but meant typically non-public repos on any platform) due to ease of use and how inadequate secret management solutions can be.
Luckily that’s not the majority of projects, but I bet it happens a lot more elsewhere. Definitely a bunch for your average outsourced/freelance/scrappy/non-funded project.
Whether anyone will actually use your secrets or even code that’s sent to these large AI shops, though, that’s another question. You might as well question using GitHub cause it’s owned by M$.
honey pot that shit. attackers, security companies, GitHub themselves, are all crawling GitHub for leaked credentials and will tell you that they've been leaked. GitHub very much knows what a GitHub API key looks like. So you stick a GitHub API key with the least useful permission you can think of into your secrets file. If that file ever gets uploaded to GitHub, they'll cancel the key and email you about it, so then you know the rest of the keys in that file have been leaked as well.
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.
Yes, but at this point I'd almost rather have my CC info exposed than my personal info. There is law and consequence for fraudulent charges that protects me from loss (if not inconvenience) but there is basically no protection for playing fast and loose with my PII--in fact, it's the opposite! They sell it!
I haven’t thought about it this way but yeah I totally agree. Most of the major consequences from my CC info getting leaked can be dealt with without major long term impact to my life. The same cannot be said about PII currently
It also means your data is one unfortunate coffee spill on the laptop keyboard from being gone forever. Unless you are doing your own cloud backups of your data and syncing it somehow. Which now the vibe coded app is really starting to grow in requirements then. Most people want that just handled for them.
If you want to be completely watertight, you can absolutely run an on premises model. No data ever leaves your network, ever. Some pretty good models run on $5-10k hardware
Can’t do that with SaaS
Also, I’m baffled that on HN of all places, I have to actually defend the idea of rolling your own apps and protecting your data from cloud providers
Until vibecoding agents somehow develop the capability to sign up for a cloud storage API and pay for it on their own, you can probably be pretty sure about that.
They would pay to see whatever local files your settings and skills allow the agent to see (plus whatever skills they infiltrated, something you'll have zero visibility about)
vibe code manifest.xml to disallow network access. If you're really paranoid, you can use Google search to look up the permissions names instead of relying on an LLM to do it.
Some of this "I can do it for free" stuff gives me the vibes of people who monitor gas prices every day. Only to drive 10 miles out of their way to save $0.30 a gallon filing their 15 gallon tank ($4.50 savings - $2.00 gas used - $X for time). They probably also buy an overpriced drink/snack for a net negative value proposition even if time is free.
Some of these things are the feeling of "getting a deal" or "screwing the system" and people can spend their time in whatever way brings them joy. I don't want to be a "markdown editor app developer" or whatever and would rather work on more creative endeavors. In the end, we give our time to get money and then trade our money for time but time is our only limited resource.
I'm one of those guys you speak of, that would do that fully knowingly. The point is principle. If I feel I'm being exploited, then I will refuse to deal with something/somebody even if it's in my own short term best interest. It's not really screwing the system so much as screwing people trying to screw me, and I find the satisfaction that gives me as being worth substantially more than whatever I might lose in money. For a less self motivated reason, if all of society behaved like this - the world would also be a much better place.
More generally, I don't view time as some resource to be used to achieve some ultimate goal. In the end the only goal we're going to achieve is death. So in the interim I'd rather do actions that give me satisfaction rather than those that give me money, because in the end - the point of that money is to bring satisfaction anyhow, so I'm just cutting out the middle man.
These parties aren’t screwing you. They’re offering a service at a price. You pay for convenience. You may not value your time, but most do. That’s why certain gas stations command a higher price.
I'm not paying for anything except a product. When the price of that product is unreasonably detached from the cost of providing that product, the consumer is being screwed. This is the entire point that capitalism only functions with strong competition, but that is increasingly absent in many locations and domains.
'screwing the people who want to screw you' is a losing game. You're spending time you could spend doing something positive doing something that just arouses negative emotion.
It's not a negative emotion at all. It makes me feel great! I fully realize that many people won't do this, so it's not like I'm expecting my little 'mini boycotts' to have any meaningful material impact on the people engaging in dubious business practices. I do it because it makes me feel good. The fact that it's overall a good thing for society, even better if more people did it, is just a pleasant side effect.
Weekend projects are fun and a great way to experiment with new technologies. AI is this new technology and most engineer should be familiar with how useful it is and it's limitations.
Sure, if you hate coding it's prob not worth it. But I don't see it as an expense. In fact I value it so I would even not go as far as to deem a failure as a loss.
What's actually going on here is the Unix Philosophy applied to more and more platforms.
Previously, if you wanted to rig up a screen recording app in a few minutes you'd use Linux and specifically one of the minimal desktop environments like i3 or sway. Then you'd wire up a few command line utilities (slurp, wf-recorder, etc) and get the exact experience you want. These small unix tools allowed the greater ecosystem to just cobble together what they wanted without too much hassle. I've done exactly this!
This is the exact mindset that keeps people away. They'd prefer to NOT maintain their own video recording software THANK YOU VERY MUCH. So you get people who go to Mac OS because there's always a slick solution for a couple bucks and you never have to be TOO fiddly.
This doesn't destroy the market for people in the latter camp, but it DOES open up the market for people in the former.
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.
Part will be for new features, but no doubt that another big part will be for platform support over time. There's just too little backwards compatibility guarantees nowadays from the big players. We need more Microsofts in that sense!
> 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'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.
They are, but it's not their fault - Wayland removes so much functionality that X had, and delegates that to the WM/DE.
I tried to do a small personal app last year for myself that intercepted and injected events for keyboard and mouse. Not possible in Wayland (so I switched to X instead) - that is delegated to the WM/DE.
There's hundreds of these tiny little cuts that cause friction for app devs.
DE stuff is part of the picture, but there’s churn outside of those too. glibc, which is used in practically everything, is the classic example but across the whole of the Linux desktop sphere, it’s unusual for libraries to maintain compatibility.
The only reason why Linux desktops work at all is thanks to package managers and their maintainers doing the heavy lifting of keeping applications and the libraries they use in lockstep. If it weren’t for that random programs would be breaking every other update.
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.
> And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail
Funny you mention Fastmail. I was happy most of the past decade until this week. I just had my email blown up by their new Paddle billing system with a ton of billing invoices since they decided it was no longer ok that I pay them a lump sump every 2 years, and that I must go onto monthly now. Initially I thought they were hacked but nope, just terrible communication.
I emailed them a few days ago and they only confirmed that Paddle is their merchant of record and they have been migrating accounts over slowly.
Tonight the CEO sent out a blast saying resellers need to be on monthly billing with their new system at new pricing.
Sorry Fastmail, I paid for 2 years back in October (I think this is my 3rd cycle with them). If you want me on monthly billing then you will wait until October 2027. That is a ‘you’ problem not a ‘me’ problem if you undersold the subscription this cycle.
> 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.
> If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo
In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed. In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that, and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value!
What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.
Life is not an optimization problem. You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.
It's just common-sense though - if the market is willing to pay me $100/widget, why would I sell it for `($10 cost to manufacture + 35% markup)`?
The new lower bound for simple side-hustle apps now is virtually zero. All you need is a computer, electricity, internet and (optionally) $20.
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.
That's not at all how I think products are priced. That sound's like something you'd tell a kindergartner to shut them up.
> You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.
I have never found myself in a Walmart at 1am* nor have I ever gotten angry at toilet paper (I get the Charmin ultra from Costco like a normal person). You need to re-calibrate because you sound like an Inland Empire methhead. Pro tip: you want to shoplift the detergent. That tends to trade better with the other methheads.
* Not entirely true, but that's just because the Reno Walmart stocks up on Burning Man supplies and Gerlach only sells shitty playa bikes.
You are definitely a professional/industryspecialist - so its quite obvious why you pay for this, same as a mechanic is paying for very important and expensive tools.
This mindest is not possible for "non-professionals" :-)
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. Some beers are better value than others but 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?
> How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them?
There are no subscription services which can beat Fastmail, iCloud, Kagi or YouTube in value for your dollar. So you can stop looking.
There are many subscription services which offer good or even great value, or mediocre. But since you demand that value has to be better or equal than the great value Fastmail gives you for you to be interested, then I'm telling you that you're not going to find it.
> "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder
Agreed, but the confusing part is that you don't seem to be saying "to me, those services only provide X amount of value, and I'd rather have $Y than that" -- you seem to be saying that if 1password and Fastmail were more expensive, you might be willing to pay the asking price for some of those services you currently consider bad value.
You’re absolutely right! If Fastmail or 1password charged more for their services, the bar for what I consider good value would be different. Those two services are _absolutely_ worth more to me than they currently charge and I’d be happy to pay.
But they don’t, which is why I use them as my baseline. If my email provider and password manager - two services with damn near infinite vendor lockin - can do it, no one has any excuse.
Which is your choice, obviously, but you can see why people would find it strange -- it seems like you're potentially just leaving value on the table for an arbitrary reason. The price of Fastmail doesn't affect the value you would get from some unrelated product, so surely that other product is either worth the asking price or not worth it regardless of how much Fastmail is charging.
What do you mean infinite vendor lock in? Just export your vault and import it in another password manager and switching email provider is not that hard either (assuming you use your own domain).
It certainly was when the options were pirate or buy, and the prices per year were much higher than $10/mo gets you.
The BIG difference is that we didn't felt entitled to use everything that is fashionable or switch apps every couple of months.
We would do a research across several magazines, local computer clubs, and the few lucky ones that had online access, some BBS or Usenet groups, then buy that one package and live with it for a couple of years, regardless of their limitations.
The inference is cheap, but the context window costs for iteratively debugging architecture issues add up fast. Things like state management or migrations usually require feeding the whole stack back in multiple times, which blows past that budget pretty quickly in my experience.
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.
>> 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.
How would the economics of this work universally? Jetbrains is a bit of an oddity in terms of SaaS. For the most part, it's desktop or on-premises software that was sold with a perpetual license. If you've bought a subscription and canceled, they've generated some revenue. Maintaining a subscription generates more revenue for them, but they can slow or stop development without stopping you from using the product.
SaaS is typically some server software hosted by someone else which most often doesn't have an on-premises version. They can stop making feature updates, but if they turn off the servers, the service ends. They still have costs even if you use the software less. You can argue about the profit margins, but that's not the point here. As most SaaS companies don't start with on-premises, they can't ever get their software working there for many reasons. There are a few like Atlassian and GitHub that do both, but if you look at the heritage, both are really on-premises first.
Or drop the price to $20 a year instead of $20 a month and and focus on small software updated infrequently. Software as a service has a dirty secret that it was more service than software. The companies became larded with payroll and most never had great gross margins.
Pretty much. A lot of software is just good enough already, just keep security updates going and fix occasional bug people complain for too long.
But that might require just firing some people because that amount of man-hours is not needed any more or moving them to make something new and no investor likes it
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.
I just don't understand this naive argument against subscription. If I have to pay same amount of money, I will pay in subscription than paying one time. So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue. As a consumer I will prefer the second option.
For $40 product, I will rather pay $1/month than $40 once. It keeps the incentive aligned. I think most people just assume that if the devs move away from subscription they would be fine with lower revenue and would charge less.
> So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue.
Does the software stop working after the 2 years? If so, I’d go subscription (or find another product that doesn’t explode). If it doesn’t, I’d pay the $400 assuming I want to use it for more than 2 years.
You wrongly assume that you are left with the SaaS product after paying for it for 2 years. For the one time payment, you will still have the software 2 years and more down the road.
It could be anything from month to decades depending on the subscription. And the price should be accordingly (risk based)adjusted for the same revenue.
regardless of whether an app _does_ ongoing development. there's plenty of examples - especially mobile - of apps switching to subscriptions and simultaneously slowing down development, which is maddening
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.
No amount of what ifs and buts is going to change the fact that the tech is now mature enough to make software in hours that previously needed man-years.
Well, for non-standalone apps you also need some degree of ongoing support, at the very least to patch the security bug in your app or update libraries that have those.
and when whatever framework or big lib you use decide "well we're making new version, everything you made will break, have fun", that needs engineering too.
Buy once model is pretty much only for standalone, offline apps. Anything online and you have to start to worry about supporting new TLS versions or having to update certificate store (if app for some bizzare reason ignores system one)
> 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.
> I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.
Probably not.
I also paid for FreeFileSync (the donation version) instead of rolling my own local backups (across drives), as well as MobaXTerm because I really like their UI/UX and so on. Software that others have developed and supported for multiple years, which has been already tested by a lot of folks thoroughly across their usecases is probably a good bet, doubly so if you can buy it (or I guess choose to support the devs) instead of renting it, the difference being that in the latter case you're not in control.
At the same time, 30 USD gets you about (assuming 85 input and 15 output split, which approximately matches my stats across months):
(actual figures would change with the input/output proportion, it matters a lot, and also any caching)
Not really enough to build serious software, but definitely quite the bit of help along the way!
Or if you go with subscriptions, it can vary even more, even if will cap how much you can do per day.
For example, if you pay 50 USD for Cerebras Code, you get 24M tokens per day, so that'd be close to 730M tokens per month. They're running GLM 4.7 which isn't SOTA in my experience, but is somewhere around Sonnet 4 and therefore actually quite capable: https://z.ai/blog/glm-4.7 (my experience might not match the benchmarks, but either way it can be good enough for most stuff out there)
For a decent percentage of software development, maybe where you want a feature nobody else out there has, AI can help you get rid of enough friction and lend enough help along the way, to maybe make it worthwhile. The caveat there might be that you have to treat the expense of your own time as something you do for the enjoyment of it (building something, or the delayed gratification of benefitting from using the software).
I probably didn't market it enough but I specifically made an iOS game last year to be premium, $2.99, as a one time purchase to try and get around the obsession with subscription and freemium/ad-supported models but pretty much didn't get any more than a handful of sales.
At least for games I think it's much too late for the one time purchase model unless you're part of a pro studio making relatively big games.
If you need $1M/y in subscriptions to build your software, you'll be outcompete by solos who needs $60k/y and don't care about the 100% churn of a one-time fee.
This is simply market optimization when the marginal cost of producing the good falls.
> First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free.
Yes, but it's almost one time payment. Your own personal use case is usually narrow enough, and you don't need to support different OS/browsers. You can vibe code it and just forget the fact it's coded.
Actually it's the best use case for vibe coding (the strict meaning of this word) - when you don't plan to maintain the codebase anyway.
It's the app "stores" that encourage and push for that.
You pay less tax to them when you do subscriptions rather than one time payments, if I recall especially with Apple Store (something like 30% first year, 15% the second year of subscription).
This is why 120$ over 10 years (1$/month) is more profitable to companies than 120$ in a shot.
JerBrains does something similar (after paying for a year I get perpetual license for the version released that year). I’m pretty happy and feel under control. I have been paying them for years now and in case they screw up I will stop my subscription and still can download and use old version. Sure I will be missing on some bug fixes but I have used the software for a year already, I can live with those annoyances. It’s not like the new version will be all bug free either.
Why would it only be a year of updates? Just go back to how it was 10 years ago when most software was a 1 time purchase and you got updates until the next major version, then maybe you'd only get bug fixes and security updates until your OS deprecated some API the app depended on.
The industry had arguably more innovative products than exist today and that business model worked totally fine until the platform gatekeepers and VCs invented SaaS because they decided they weren't making enough money and needed to do some rent seeking.
And by the way, this still IS the software market I participate in, because there’s a lot of great indie software still adhering to it. It’s still possible. I have weeded out almost all unnecessary SaaS. I do actually have Fastmail and 1Password, which is funny since those were mentioned here a lot.
A few recent example purchases (macOS): BBEdit, Base, A Better Finder Renamer, Nitro (that’s lifetime, though I actually prefer “until the next major version”).
it's an economic problem, not a technical one, imo.
unfortunately, we no longer live in an economic environment that supports being able to run a stable business that way. if cost of living were still relatively stable/affordable/predictable? sure.
i would love to see everyone go back to this model, but sadly i don't see that happening unless the person offering it is independently wealthy/comfortable by other means.
I think the best way is you buy a software, and that version is supported "forever".
The developer then creates version n+1. The old version is kept supported, but new features go only into the new version, which you can optionally buy again.
Time/energy wise, even with agentic coding, that's probably not the most fun value proposition for smaller/solo dev teams. I now have to maintain a mental model of several versions of my software, track features, refactors, etc across all the supported versions, and make sure my work doesn't overlap too much lest I cause more bugs while keeping everything stable.
I wouldn't charge customers _less_ for that just because it's now a one-time payment.
You can pay to unlock advanced features and keep them and any new features added in a year, after that any new features are paywalled for another unlock, and another +12 months, perpetually.
This is going to be a serious problem. We’ve had smart devices percolate through all consumer electronics, from washing machines to fridges. That’s all fine and dandy but they all need RAM. At what point does this become a national security issue? People need these things and they all require RAM and now assumably will cost more as the raw chip cost increases significantly or the supply chains dry up for lower quantities all together.
The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something. It's one thing to raise the price on a license, but it's another thing to not even support local pricing (you can even do this dynamically) or try to meet users halfway. The thing that companies like this do not understand is that simply changing the price structure on Japanese customers overnight with no acknowledgement of this comes off as entirely the wrong way. It ruins business relationships. Sure, Fontworks might have had a compelling product, but part of the product was their domestic presence.
Now the choice is realistically between Monotype (doesn't really understand the Japanese market) and DynaComware (Taiwan-based, but has previously interacted with Japanese companies). I wonder where their customers will go on short notice? As is mentioned, at least one company switched to DynaComware. SEGA's rhythm games contain both DynaFont (DynaComware) and Fontworks fonts, for example.
Basically, if you're going to raise prices, at least do something about the fact that your core market is heavily relationship dependent and won't take kindly to a sudden rug pull.
There used to be a meme of people thinking that the Japanese market was somehow inherently biased to domestic companies and unwilling to touch western products. When the reality is moreso that almost every western company that tries launching products in Japan assumes they can just crush the local competition and gets their shit kicked in for the trouble.
The few companies that actually did well in Japan did so specifically because they spent at least five minutes to understand the local context and adapt their business to actually make sense there. Any western companies that actually do this get embraced like nothing else by the Japanese audience. I'm reminded of Apple deliberately pushing for emoji in Unicode just so they could sell iPhones that weren't beholden to the horrible mess that was Japanese telecom emoji standards...
> The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something.
In general I don't think it's just that. Pretty much all font foundries have... insufferable business models.
I once emailed one Japanese foundry asking to license one of their font to use on my website. I wanted a perpetual, one-time license to use on a single website, and I wanted to store and serve their font from my server. I was even prepared to pay low four figures for it.
Nope. I was told I need to pay a subscription fee, and I need to use their crappy Javascript to serve it. Okay, if you don't want my money then I'm not going to insist.
There will always be a place for calligraphy, artisan, who place creativity, handcraft and art first.
You can see it like pizzas:
there will always be someone who actually makes these pizzas from scratch; grows his own tomatoes in his garden, does his own flour, does his own cheese, raises pigs, etc.
But these are exceptions, maybe 0.001% - it gets very very expensive, these people do it for passion and art, not for money or scale.
You need to pre-order your pizza weeks before, you will pay a lot and you are not sure what will be the final taste (hopefully tasty), and you buy a story and supports someone.
On the other end, you have companies like Gustavo Gusto who produce 100'000 pizzas a day.
Quality ingredients, great execution, convenient, immediate, available and cheaper than hiring someone.
The irony is that the expensive and slow small artisan may actually make a worse product, than something which has been battle-tested on millions of people and whose supply chain has been controlled end-to-end.
After all of that, the industrial fonts like Roboto are not that bad, and if the industrial people offer you to customize it in a couple of prompts, then this is the cherry on top.
It's not about the shilling. It's about death of quality. As society we are self-destructing our culture using trash AI copies. It doesn't matter if it's fonts, code, movies or illustrations. Look at that service - the fonts are shit to meh but they are free. Corpo managers will of course want to squeeze every drop so they will push for free - especially as the AI gets close. So instead of allowing someone obsessive to produce highest quality output they can… we stop this by using stolen copy. In this can only lead to wiping any concepts of quality in our society while also robbing the people producing the quality work.
I for one, love it. I want every single mega corporation using crappy AI to the point where we can identify and not buy their products. Leave the little guys alone, they don't print money yet; so have not much choice.
Please don't be irrational. We all can make fun at clueless suits desperately throwing money at the AI buzzword furnace while still recognizing there are practical applications for it.
You know, I'd have to say that responding to a comment that says "Japanese font foundries are about to be replaced with generative AI" with a plug for your generative-AI fonts is about as on topic as you can be. I challenge you to describe a reason why that's a bad response.
I have a friend with life circumstances that are complicated and she survives on SNAP. Every move like this is detrimental and jeopardizes the ability for her to stay alive. I do not understand or fathom why this program is run in such a cruel, uncaring way. I’m sure there is fraud, but there are many people with permanent disabilities and other things going on who don’t have the capacity to “just reapply” without significant effort. There is no need to do this when they can simply audit the usage.
I think this is one of the many indicators that even though these models get “version upgrades” it’s closer to switching to a different brain that may or may not understand or process things the way you like. Without a clear jump in performance, people test new models and move back to ones they know work if the new ones aren’t better or are actually worse.
ChatGPT when using 5 or 5-Thinking doesn’t even follow my “custom instructions” on the web version. It’s a serious downgrade compared to the prior generation of models.
AT&T has a history of lying about what its network is. They were advertising HSPA+ as 4G and then recently started advertising LTE as "5G E". I can't find a lot of articles about the 4G branding one since the 5G one started.
> show_4g_for_lte_data_icon_bool
Realistically I think this is just a choice that many carriers made. It's quite common to see 4G instead of LTE outside of the US. Technically speaking I think WiMAX counted as 4G when there were competing 4G standards and you could make an argument that LTE is just one of the 4G standards.
> The Joint Venture will secure U.S. apps through software assurance protocols, and review and validate source code on an ongoing basis, assisted by its Trusted Security Partner, Oracle.
So the new team will be in charge of content moderation, training, and "review and validat[ion]" of source code. Not actually a new app.
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