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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

71–80 of 390 posts

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#71
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?

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#72

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…

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

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#73

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…

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#74

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.…

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#75

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.…

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#76

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#77
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!

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#78
post #10

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 believe it's a play on "Your margin is my opportunity".

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#79
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.

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