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

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#361

Post by ithkuil » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

jbstack wrote: post #260

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. "

And yet for whatever reason, jabber actually works for me. I have tried a few apps, some of them I even paid for and I thought voice recognition is not good for me (I'm a L2 speaker).

Whatever the default model was choose for jabber, it just hits my sweet spot: it recognizes my speech faster than typing (I type relatively quickly and speak relatively slowly, so any lag in the recognition can quickly tip the scale).

I honestly don't know what a real production software of this kind would do better (besides the promise that somebody will actually take care of issuing updates for the next time apple breaks backward compat)

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#362

Post by arandomhuman » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 7:17 PM 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.…

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

So most software is 180% of 100%? :p

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#363

Post by almostlikemagic » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 7:30 PM UTC

strange_quark wrote: post #201

almostlikemagic wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gateke…

it's an economic problem, not a technical one, imo.

unfortunately, we no longer live in an economic environment that supports being able to run a stable business that way. if cost of living were still relatively stable/affordable/predictable? sure.

i would love to see everyone go back to this model, but sadly i don't see that happening unless the person offering it is independently wealthy/comfortable by other means.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#364

Post by almostlikemagic » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

TheChelsUK wrote: post #271

gf000 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best way is you buy a software, and that version is supported "forever". The developer then creates version n+1. The old version is kept supported, but new features go only into the new version, which you can optionally buy again.

Workingcopy app is a better model. You can pay to unlock advanced features and keep them and any new features added in a year, after that any new features are paywalled for another unlock, and another +12 months, perpetually.

done well i feel like this could be a lot less threatening of a model.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#365

Post by neomantra » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

eddguzzo wrote: post #351

neomantra wrote: post #71

I've been evangelizing vibe coding, because we are wielding something much more powerful now than even ~3 months prior (Nov was the turning point). Now that Prometheus (the myth, not the o11y tool) has dropped these LLMs on us, I've been using this thought experiment to consider the multi-layered implications: In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food?

>In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food? I would guess for convenience and saving time. While vibe-coding might be faster, you still have to "do it". As in, think about what you want your software to do, write out or dictate your prompts, test that it works etc. That takes time (might be less time than writing it out by hand but it's still a non-zero amount of time).

I think my comment was misconstrued as siding either way. I didn't communicate it well. It's that it frames questions -- like you were exploring.

Because of course we all buy prepared foods of all sorts from street vendors to fast food to local restaurants to chains to Michelin Stars. While there are many reasons one will cook for themselves, there are many reasons one will buy from someone else too.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#366

Post by migsvult » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

This post mentions apps used as an individual. I think that more or less makes sense for some subset of engineers that enjoy this type of weekend project. But once you extend this out to an org, and you're saving a sub for every 'seat', a lot of things start making sense to homebrew. And yes, you get less polish, but you also get customizability. Our small startup reduced spend on subscriptions by several thousand by having one jr replace non-core subscriptions with simple vived alternatives over the course of a couple weeks. Even outside of the savings, I think I prefer the new apps.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#367

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:23 PM 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…

A big pricing problem in software is that people try to sell products as-if you'd use all the features, but people rarely have any interest in most of it.

There are whole products that succeed by simply being less capable, but cheaper, variations of some other product. This is most obvious in the art space, where you can visually see the reduction in tools and menu items.

This people often don't want support, maintenance, or future development. Their needs have been met.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#368

Post by nektro » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:36 PM UTC

if we had UBI these apps wouldn't need to charge in the first place

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#369

Post by bandrami » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #344

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?

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

Wait of course I was assuming a local model. People aren't using hosted AI on machines holding data that they care about being exfiltrated, right?

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#370

Post by rhubarbtree » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 11:34 PM UTC

monooso wrote: post #292

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 [some commercial app] in a weekend. No, you cannot. If the article was claiming that you could , you might have a point. > You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of [some commercial app]. Which is precisely and explicitly what the author has done.

But throwaway is not a replacement, it is something that will break after some time unless you maintain it. And now, no, you did not make it in a weekend.