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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

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Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#101

Post by theshrike79 »

pixl97 wrote: post #87
theshrike79 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how you define "production". 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.

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 up…

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#102

Post by carlosjobim »

throwup238 wrote: post #42
Shank wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#103

Post by throw0129 »

I must admit that I find this thread very funny. "Spend $200 a month so that you can waste a weekend to make a shitty clone of a SaaS app so that you can save $10" is... somewhat questionable, as far as sensible decisions go. Some people even seem to assume that this is a death kneel of the entire saas app industru, since everybody can just vibe code an inferior knockoff of bejeweled or whatever.

It just boggles he mind how divorced from reality some people are. You could offer $fotm_ai_model with infinite usage, free apple developer account (since you're apparently replacing everything you have with homegrown stuff) and the amount of people wasting their weekends on vibe-cloning their own custom apps would still approximate to zero. This doesn't even get to the fact that the majority of apps already HAVE a free alternative, and it's certainly far less effort to replace increasingly obnoxious apple music with foobar than to build, test and then permanently support your own music player. You also probably want claude code 15 to replace anything non-trivial, otherwise, well, good luck.

I don’t think I’d bother even if my weekend had ten times as many hours as it does, and I’m a code monkey that still mostly enjoys his job.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#104

Post by cosmic_cheese »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #68
Shank wrote: post #5

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 $3…

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 godkn…

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#106

Post by seemaze »

Lower the barrier to MVP while raising the bar on the level of quality that warrants MRR. Rising tides and all..

I can hire a contractor to build a carport, or whack one together with some supplies from the Big Box store. More roofs being built with more price points to serve the market.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#107

Post by _puk »

theshrike79 wrote: post #101
pixl97 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 up…

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.

someone will cry if you lose money or data.. the rest.. vibe code away!

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#109

Post by NuclearPM »

kevinsync wrote: post #91

I keep seeing versions of this soliloquy on here, sometimes multiple times every day. They make fine blog posts, it's something to say and something to read, but ultimately remind me more of piling into a Tiktok trend than anything else: everybody's doing it, so I will too! End of the day, much like when photography went digital (and smartphones got good cameras), yes, there were a LOT more photos taken, but the rela…

Most small businesses don’t need the complexity of Salesforce and people use Netflix for the content, not the software.

I don’t understand why Netflix needs 3500 engineers. They built what needed to be built already.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#110

Post by egonschiele »

I've been using a Wispr equivalent I made myself since 2023. It's wild to me that people pay for it, and I've wondered if I should try to monetize what I use. It is not as slick and polished, but provides essentially the same service: better speech-to-text than the built-in speech-to-text for Macs.
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