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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

#201

Post by strange_quark »

almostlikemagic wrote: post #164
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?

Why would it only be a year of updates? Just go back to how it was 10 years ago when most software was a 1 time purchase and you got updates until the next major version, then maybe you'd only get bug fixes and security updates until your OS deprecated some API the app depended on.

The industry had arguably more innovative products than exist today and that business model worked totally fine until the platform gatekeepers and VCs invented SaaS because they decided they weren't making enough money and needed to do some rent seeking.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#202

Post by flexagoon »

bandrami wrote: post #197
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That means my data never leaves my device I mean, if you vibecoded it you don't actually know that, do you?

Until vibecoding agents somehow develop the capability to sign up for a cloud storage API and pay for it on their own, you can probably be pretty sure about that.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#203

Post by throwup238 »

retsibsi wrote: post #196
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…

> "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder Agreed, but the confusing part is that you don't seem to be saying "to me, those services only provide X amount of value, and I'd rather have $Y than that" -- you seem to be saying that if 1password and Fastmail were more expensive, you might be willing to pay the asking price for some of those services you currently consider bad value.

You’re absolutely right! If Fastmail or 1password charged more for their services, the bar for what I consider good value would be different. Those two services are _absolutely_ worth more to me than they currently charge and I’d be happy to pay.

But they don’t, which is why I use them as my baseline. If my email provider and password manager - two services with damn near infinite vendor lockin - can do it, no one has any excuse.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#204

Post by AstroBen »

tomasphan wrote: post #200
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.

Not for long. Tools to create tools will get more popular. My 70 year old mother can login to Replit and vibe code anything (and has thankfully stopped asking me to help her). We’re close to something like that for phone apps and then it’s game over for us devs.

Well Replit supports building mobile apps also: https://replit.com/mobile-apps

Game over, devs

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#205

Post by throwup238 »

fragmede wrote: post #175
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…

> If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed . In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that , and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value! What you've discovered is tha…

> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.

That's not at all how I think products are priced. That sound's like something you'd tell a kindergartner to shut them up.

> You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.

I have never found myself in a Walmart at 1am* nor have I ever gotten angry at toilet paper (I get the Charmin ultra from Costco like a normal person). You need to re-calibrate because you sound like an Inland Empire methhead. Pro tip: you want to shoplift the detergent. That tends to trade better with the other methheads.

* Not entirely true, but that's just because the Reno Walmart stocks up on Burning Man supplies and Gerlach only sells shitty playa bikes.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#206

Post by Spivak »

robofanatic wrote: post #140
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.

Exactly! It’s like I saw you selling pre-cut fruit for $7 so I decided to cut my own fruit every week.

I think the difference is I was buying pre-cut fruit for $7 every week so I spent two days and now my fruit magically cuts itself forever.

He turned an ongoing expense into a one time expense. And bonus he likely had fun doing the labor.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#208

Post by bandrami »

flexagoon wrote: post #202
bandrami wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That means my data never leaves my device I mean, if you vibecoded it you don't actually know that, do you?

Until vibecoding agents somehow develop the capability to sign up for a cloud storage API and pay for it on their own, you can probably be pretty sure about that.

An exfiltrator would have a blind upload box sitting somewhere the poisoned prompt knows about

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#209

Post by arthurofbabylon »

ffitch wrote: post #123

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…

Contrastingly, Minimal (minimal.app) is a markdown notes app made by me for me (for one person!) improved to support 100 thoughtful writers, improved again to support thousands, then tens of thousands… now 6 years later I continue to ship meaningful updates (OS parity, new features, better designs for existing features, greater stability and performance, and occasionally entirely new patterns).

What made the difference? For one thing, I know better than to ignore the future. A small success in 2020 was like a seed planted amidst an infinite future, and I knew to water the seed. Secondly, I continue prioritize this fulcrum between complexity and utility, where the app gets better by getting simpler wherever possible (most people neglect this fulcrum as not offering much “business opportunity,” failing to realize it is the foundation of all business opportunities). Finally, I just love it, and appreciate that others love it too.

(For those interested, you’re welcome to join the beta at minimal.app/#beta on Apple devices and contribute to the roadmap.)

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#210

Post by mk89 »

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…

It's the app "stores" that encourage and push for that.

You pay less tax to them when you do subscriptions rather than one time payments, if I recall especially with Apple Store (something like 30% first year, 15% the second year of subscription).

This is why 120$ over 10 years (1$/month) is more profitable to companies than 120$ in a shot.

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