Your app subscription is now my weekend project • Hacker News Board

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#121

Post by semolino » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #75

3rodents wrote: post #44

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.

Your quote caused me to consider vibecoding through the analogy of an LLM-human system as a subtractive synthesizer: the LLM is the oscillator, and the human is the filter.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#122

Post by zemvpferreira » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

SLWW wrote: post #117

I read the same tired opposing arguments all the time; I thought of it the moment I read the title. "My time isn't free, so I'll pay the tax" is true, however most of these individuals spend hours a day watching the news or doing anything else but being productive or spending time with family/friends. If you aren't working 24/7 while handling a family and telling yourself your time is worth more than a small fee, you…

Get a better hourly wage. About an hour of my month pays for all of my entertainment and software subscriptions. Another couple of hours pay for a year of iPhone. Coffee? Another hour per month maybe? We are worlds apart in our arithmetic and I don't even earn that much.

If people enjoy spending their unpaid hours building clones of paid software that's fine, but it's fine because they enjoy it. It's not minimally worth it. The time I waste on YouTube and the news etc etc is sorely needed and enjoyed downtime. If someone has enough energy to build instead of vegetating, more power to them. I prefer to save my energy for the stuff I value. (Which is actual work, helping family and games)

EDIT: another thing to consider is that each hour I spend fully pursuing my occupation pays me an hourly wage but also pays me in career growth. This compounds massively over time in higher and higher wages. Building throwaway apps generally does not. Why would I waste energy on work that doesn't compound? I'm all for serendipity but not as a financial argument.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#123

Post by ffitch » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

Building (or vibecoding) a markdown editor for a single user and their specific use case, for a 100 users, and for 10,000 users takes different amount of time and effort. In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of users.

Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good at the first glance but get abandoned before they achieve even a 100-users maturity level.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#124

Post by skybrian » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

For me it makes sense because coding agents have made software development fun again, so I do more of that than playing games or surfing the Internet.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#125

Post by alopha » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

Bishonen88 wrote: post #7

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…

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…

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.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#126

Post by Aperocky » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #105

The people who pay for the apps vs people vibecode them are largely a different demographic. Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.

Linux is free, but it doesn't come bundled with hardware that might not work with it.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#127

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

quest88 wrote: post #108

Excellent! I've done the same thing. Five prompts to have a working iOS app that solves my problem.

As a non iOS user wouldn't be the hard part getting it on the phone? The last time I checked you would still need apple hardware and 100$ per year for the developer license or something like that.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#128

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

Software itself is not inherently valuable, the value is in running and maintaining its data and any necessary integrations to other systems.

The bar for me to pay for a $10/month software subscription is pretty high, but once I make the decision that it's valuable, the actual cash cost is pretty low. Vibe coding something will never approach the quality of something that someone put enough thought and effort to turn into a product. The main place where I'll write my own software is when it's truly custom to my own needs, AI is a force multiplier for this type of work, but at the end of the day I still have very limited time to run and maintain a lot of custom software and data, so it's not going to cannibalize any of the SaaS I'm willing to pay for.

Obviously for younger software guys with more time than money, the equation will be different, but those were never the make-or-break demographic for SaaS anyway. I don't think the equation has meaningfully changed for SaaS sales due to AI, I see it more as continuously rising bar over the last two decades due to UX expectations, market saturation, limits on human attention and complexity tolerance.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#129

Post by linsomniac » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

pixelbyindex wrote: post #114

I was hoping that the current LLM/Agent/Vibecoding wave would lead to a revival of open source contributions, but I am not sure that is happening yet

I think it's happening, some of them are even making it to the front page of HN, like the "I built 50 calculators" a few days ago. I'm still working to release some of the things I've built over the last month:

- A nice little single-file web "random slideshow" to replace an aging one I bought. - A fairly feature-complete read-only SQL console. - A development SMTP server (like Mailhog) https://github.com/linsomniac/smtphotel - A work status dashboard that I'll probably release once I have run it a bit longer. - A fairly extensive Docusign-like webapp. - A retrospective meeting runner. - A cron "swiss army knife" helper. - A "social calorie tracker" (I'm unhappy with the existing ones out there).

These are all things I've vibecoded in the last month, and are more than I could have coded in my spare time in 6 months or more.

For me, the renaissance is here.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#130

Post by rambambram » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

The vibe-coding part is most in discussion here, so it's easy to overlook the financial part.

I build small web applications for my personal needs all the time by just regular programming, and I'm saving so much money by using them and not some proprietary app. Not even mentioning the advantages that it is completely bespoke, runs local and gives me peace of mind data-wise.

Some wise man once said that personal computers are a bicycle for the mind. Programming your own programs is the most pure way you train on that bicycle.