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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

21–30 of 390 posts

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#21
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.

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?).

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#22
post #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

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#25

> 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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#26
post #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 writ…

It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.

It's somewhat like the Shortcuts system on steroids.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#28
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.

Right but most of the time, in my experience they keep the lights on.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#29
> 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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#30

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 an…

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)

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