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

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#251

Post by PunchyHamster » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #186

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…

The problem with one time purchases is that they don’t allow for rent seeking behavior - the cornerstone of any sufficiently sustainable greed model

Well, for non-standalone apps you also need some degree of ongoing support, at the very least to patch the security bug in your app or update libraries that have those.

and when whatever framework or big lib you use decide "well we're making new version, everything you made will break, have fun", that needs engineering too.

Buy once model is pretty much only for standalone, offline apps. Anything online and you have to start to worry about supporting new TLS versions or having to update certificate store (if app for some bizzare reason ignores system one)

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#252

Post by sjw987 » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

rhubarbtree wrote: post #233

You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development. This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for. Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of stati…

This seems like an incredibly defensive take for vibe coding personal apps.

Replacing some subscription app like Any.do, Google Calendar, fitness/diet tracking or basically any other CRUD-centric app, needn't be insecure, and a semi-competent developer can easily host it, continue further development (with or without vibe coding) and secure it. There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves using many of these apps with active subscriptions to make their own, tailored for themselves, and cut down their spending.

Yes, when it comes to commercialising such software, more work needs to be done (mostly in support and marketing), but for personal use it's fine. The author explicitly states they don't trust vibe coding enough to turn these into products.

The writing is hardly on the wall for all these companies which make little todo list apps and calendars. The vast majority of people could get a LLM to produce an alternative but the lacking they have in basic software engineering would eventually be a hurdle to further development. Most people will continue spending $1.00/month here, and $2.99/month there. There's no reason why software engineers need to do that anymore, unless paying this gives them access to some sort of content repository (music, books) or actual advanced software.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#253

Post by lelanthran » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

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 think people will start valuing good software a lot more.

How will people determine what is good software and what is not? Even experienced engineers can't tell just by looking at the final product.

Some of the most solid rock-solid applications I see were built years ago and still look primitive (native Windows 7 controls, etc). Many of the worst, bug-infested anti-user software looks slick and modern.

> Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.

My experience with trying to complete that last 10% of a CC generated project is that it's all very alien looking; very uncanny-valley vibes, and I have serious velocity issues because of the lack of coherence.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#254

Post by svelle » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #132

> And then on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, I vibecoded Jabber. Might have a bit of difficulty naming it that ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org ). Edit: I apparently wasn't at all the first to think of this ( https://github.com/rselbach/jabber/issues/5 ).

My first thought as well, there is (or was) also Cisco Jabber which I wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole. It's generally a good idea to Google the name of the software you're about to publish online at least once.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#255

Post by th2o34i32p43k2j » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

Reminds me of the dream of the Lisp-o-sphere : where anything and everything (and its source) is at your fingertips and editable at your whim (this is what RMS wanted to do with GNU).

There's also a story about Emacs at Amazon, where secretaries would code up elaborate things to automate their stuff. It tells you how silly our world is : we're happy with shitty uninteractive systems, languages and OSs, only so that we can fix it with the next version of "genius" AI systems which can barely do anything more than remove pain of dealing with the insane bloat.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#256

Post by wiseowise » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

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…

Unless your name is “Legion”, you’re a single user, not a 10-thousand.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#257

Post by lelanthran » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #60

Shank wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate. I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to writ…

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.

> 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.

Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, try again with a different change, and repeat until they get what they want.

Good luck asking an LLM to modify something made by a different LLM 5 years ago.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#258

Post by lelanthran » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

philipwhiuk wrote: post #26

Shank wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate. I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to writ…

It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps. It's somewhat like the Shortcuts system on steroids.

> It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.

They could have done a low-code/no-code platform ages ago, but they didn't. They don't want their users creating their own apps instead of buying, because that would cannibalise their income from hopeful app devs selling 5 units at a 30% cut.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#259

Post by GTP » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

rhubarbtree wrote: post #233

You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development. This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for. Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of stati…

What you say isn't different from what the blog post says: he makes it clear that he wouldn't trust the results to be production-ready and he wouldn't sell nor recommend his vibecoded stuff to others. The only claim is that those are good enough to cover his specific use case, no more and no less.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#260

Post by jbstack » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

rhubarbtree wrote: post #233

You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development. This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for. Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of stati…

> This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend.

The author is very clear that that's not what they are trying to achieve:

"Now, don’t get me wrong, Jabber is not “production quality.” I would never sell it as a product or even recommend it to other people, but it does what I needed from Wispr Flow, and it does exactly the way I want it to."