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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

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Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#341

Post by rhubarbtree »

pu_pe wrote: post #249
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…

Insecure? What do you think is more secure, trusting a third-party SaaS with your data or processing it on your own server?

Which is more secure, a GCP instance or you managing your own infrastructure?

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#342

Post by rhubarbtree »

Illniyar wrote: post #272
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…

There is probably a huge chunk of people who only need a slither of the features of a SaaS but are paying for everything they don't need. If your particular use of a SaaS is not susceptible to security issues (for example you can use it on your local laptop) then a slither of features that are insecure is exactly the thing for you. Not everyone is going to replace SaaS with half-baked personal implementations, especi…

Reminds me of the days I used to spend building my own Linux kernels or configuring X rather than paying the "Apple Tax", thus costing myself hundreds of hours of productive work time.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#343

Post by forty »

throwup238 wrote: post #203
retsibsi wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 ha…

What do you mean infinite vendor lock in? Just export your vault and import it in another password manager and switching email provider is not that hard either (assuming you use your own domain).

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#344

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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?

If you want to be completely watertight, you can absolutely run an on premises model. No data ever leaves your network, ever. Some pretty good models run on $5-10k hardware

Can’t do that with SaaS

Also, I’m baffled that on HN of all places, I have to actually defend the idea of rolling your own apps and protecting your data from cloud providers

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#345

Post by topaz0 »

ares623 wrote: post #170
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"

They're both trust, but one is trusting a person or group of people with some intentionality.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#346

Post by forty »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #342
Illniyar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably a huge chunk of people who only need a slither of the features of a SaaS but are paying for everything they don't need. If your particular use of a SaaS is not susceptible to security issues (for example you can use it on your local laptop) then a slither of features that are insecure is exactly the thing for you. Not everyone is going to replace SaaS with half-baked personal implementations, especi…

Reminds me of the days I used to spend building my own Linux kernels or configuring X rather than paying the "Apple Tax", thus costing myself hundreds of hours of productive work time.

Well done choosing to invest in your knowledge and neurones rather than in investors wallet :)

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#347

Post by jadbox »

jppope wrote: post #337

Its sooooo weird to me that indie software is the target... the author is interested in replacing things that were always accessible to replace but not really worth it (Typora is still one of my favs) and not at all interested in replacing trash enterprise software. I see basically no reason why Salesforce can't be taken down by a 2-3 person team right now. Shopify? Everything Intuit? Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)?

The likely hard truth: 90% of software 'itself' will be easily replaceable, especially indie software. The reason why Shopify, Jira, TurboTax, etc are hard to replace is due to most of the HARD work being OUTSIDE software- the legal work for being a payment processor, legal insurance, special client relationships that only salesmen can foster, high market TRUST requirements, legal COMPLIANCE (HIPAA), etc etc. I'm fairly convinced that AI coding is going to force most programmers to move into becoming experts in specific business hard problems.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#348

Post by jppope »

jadbox wrote: post #347
jppope wrote: post #337

Its sooooo weird to me that indie software is the target... the author is interested in replacing things that were always accessible to replace but not really worth it (Typora is still one of my favs) and not at all interested in replacing trash enterprise software. I see basically no reason why Salesforce can't be taken down by a 2-3 person team right now. Shopify? Everything Intuit? Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)?

The likely hard truth: 90% of software 'itself' will be easily replaceable, especially indie software. The reason why Shopify, Jira, TurboTax, etc are hard to replace is due to most of the HARD work being OUTSIDE software- the legal work for being a payment processor, legal insurance, special client relationships that only salesmen can foster, high market TRUST requirements, legal COMPLIANCE (HIPAA), etc etc. I'm fai…

100% we are definitely heading towards a world where we work on hard problems and novel problems. The days of a team building a dashboard for a year for a crud app are likely behind us

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#349

Post by pu_pe »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #341
pu_pe wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insecure? What do you think is more secure, trusting a third-party SaaS with your data or processing it on your own server?

Which is more secure, a GCP instance or you managing your own infrastructure?

Remember that TFA is talking about personal tools that run on his own computer, so definitely his own infrastructure is more secure. Right now in Europe, GCP (like any other American cloud provider) is a big no-go as well, so I'm not sure even in professional settings the comparison holds.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#350

Post by godelski »

pickleglitch wrote: post #333

What I don't get about this is that it looks like there are decent open-source alternatives to all of the services mentioned. The most egregious example is the markdown editor. There are lots of free, open-source markdown editors out there. Why would you vibe-code your own? Just because you can?

This is what confused me too. Why are people paying for these types of things? They don't need vibe coding, they need a search engine. Ironically I'm confident the LLMs could find them a free version of what they're looking for. But that's the problem with them, right? They do what you ask and don't question if there's a better way
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