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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

11–20 of 390 posts

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#11

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 i…

$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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#12
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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#13

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…

> 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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#15
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

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#16
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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#17
post #14

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.

If you build enough things, you will also gain the experience to fix those things

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#18
post #14

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#19
> 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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#20
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

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