Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 390 posts

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#161

Post by throwup238 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #155
throwup238 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value. I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not agains…

Then you cannot ever buy a cup of coffee, because it's also very bad value compared to Fastmail. Or a beer. > The vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens. Then why are you looking at them,

I don’t buy cups of coffee unless it’s on vacation, brewed by a great barista with years of experience. Instead I have a $600 roaster, a $100 burr grinder, and a $10 Turkish coffee pot that have produced many thousands of good cups of coffee over more than a decade. Including the cost of bulk beans, I probably spend about as much on my caffeine addiction as 1password and Fastmail combined. Seems like a decent value to me?

I think your value system is completely broken if you think I can’t have a beer just because they cost more than fastmail. Some beers are better value than others but I enjoy having a beer. I don’t enjoy logging into some overpriced SaaS to do something that Claude can do for me now instead.

> Then why are you looking at them,

How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them?

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#162

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

> I’m often asked to make small videos showing some support agent how something works

Fwiw, Google has had a free in-browser tool for this for ages, makes capture really simple on any device with a browser: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#163

Post by dangus »

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…

Even getting an app on the Apple App Store requires a $100/year payment. You either grow users continuously or you ask for a subscription.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#164

Post by almostlikemagic »

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 do you feel about licensing where you pay once, get the software, and have access to updates for one year?

if you want future updates, you pay for another year of updates (discounted, of course, for loyalty).

or is it more compelling to just have one clean, flat, lifetime rate?

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#165

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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

The incentive for sending in patches was that you needed to fix a bug in software you were using for your own use case, so you might as well send the authors the patch, and they'd keep maintaining it all for you. But if you can vibe-code your own solution, you don't need to use somebody else's software, so the patch doesn't get made, much less submitted.

The other thing is, LLMs tend to generate terrible code that pisses off open-source maintainers. So I'm not sure even LLM-made patches will make it into open source much.

This might be the death of traditional open source. Vibe-coded-only open source may be the next generation. Which I'm fine with, as long as we can start regulating software, so that vibe-coded tools are banned for safety/privacy uses unless they follow a software building code.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#166

Post by agotterer »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #162

> I’m often asked to make small videos showing some support agent how something works Fwiw, Google has had a free in-browser tool for this for ages, makes capture really simple on any device with a browser: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/

Zapier also has a free product which works well - https://zapier.com/zappy

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#167

Post by zahlman »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #149
zahlman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions. ... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).

Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.

It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.

Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#168

Post by theultdev »

ffitch wrote: post #148
gdilla wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean, sure. but the point is, you yourself are often a solo user of these little productivity apps. if you're not using team-based features then a lot of these things aren't worth paying for.

I didn’t mean collaboration features. I clumsily used 10,000-users as a measure of the app completeness.

"10k user completeness" might be full of "features" you don't want that clutter the ui and add entropy.

You know how you think and know your goals so a customized, focused solution would be better than something for the general masses.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#169

Post by Uptrenda »

So tired of these posts about people jerking themselves off over how good they are because they used AI to shit out some trivial bullshit. Like, I'm glad you're saving time and money. That's what AI now does. It's what millions of other engineers here --already know--. But why do we have to know about it? Is it remotely noteworthy or unexpected? Why does HN continue to upvote this self-serving, gratuitous, bullshit? Do you guys want HN to look like OP for the next [however long] this AI hype cycle takes to reach saturation (probably another 5 years at this point.) Even the biggest AI soyboy will be sick of it by then.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#170

Post by ares623 »

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.…

Opensource has been available since before the internet. What is `git clone ... make install` if not "vibe coding"
Post reply on HN