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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#101

Post by bwfan123 »

Finbarr wrote: post #11

I wrote an article about this a few days ago that has been gaining a lot of traction: https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.

> This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades

IBM still sells mainframes but is no longer a growth darling.

> Markets are right to reassess multiples. But reassessing multiples is very different from pricing in extinction

What you are missing is that the SaaS companies were extremely overpriced. For instance, crm after all the carnage is still priced at 25 times earnings which is historically high for anything that is not a growth company. The perception was that these companies would print money year after year selling software trinkets on their platforms and as such were placed in the growth category. Now, it is plainly obvious that these software trinkets can be produced easily by anyone using AI. Their pricing-power has dramatically declined. Hence the re-rating. None of this contradicts the thesis in your ai-assisted article that these businesses have moats just like IBM and its mainframes. These businesses are now in a vicious reflexive narrative loop where the narrative will impact the real-world which will further fuel the narrative.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#102

Post by Keyframe »

onion2k wrote: post #24
camdenreslink wrote: post #7

Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?

That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really been that difficult. Having the ideas necessary to know wh…

This is what people don't get, what's coming up and it'll hit them like a ton of bricks. Software development, after toy examples, was a scale limiting factor for the better part of software development if you had domain expertise. Now, we hear constantly that it doesn't matter since "muh experience" and architecture, choices, tradeoffs etc for which you need seniority to operate LLM efficiently (or at all). This is true, of course. What people don't seem to get that that's what's coming next. Your experience won't mean crap anymore and then the ride starts full blast.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#104

Post by aavci »

neya wrote: post #60

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and every…

What happened to clawd/molt?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#105

Post by Keyframe »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #36
camdenreslink wrote: post #7

Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?

Addendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software? People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It wou…

Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat?

My guess is two-fold. One, they are specialized in AI. Two, building another anthropic is a big moat and they like to keep it big vs what you could build with it.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#106

Post by jkla562 »

The article's right that build costs are collapsing, but that was rarely the hard part. The cost of a real product is architecture decisions, security, data modeling, ops — stuff that doesn't disappear because Claude wrote your CRUD layer.

What I think actually changes is the packaging. Per-seat subscriptions assumed humans in dashboards. That's the part on borrowed time. The workflow logic underneath still has value — it just gets consumed differently as agents start doing the clicking.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#107

Post by benjiro »

SoftTalker wrote: post #96
colesantiago wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vibecoded an app for my business and didn’t need any engineers and it is currently in use for our customers. I think this is great for everyone to be a developer, the gatekeeping has now been removed and we will see a creative explosion of apps that everyone can build. The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.

I think you overestimate the ability of AI to write perfectly secure apps. Humans can't do it, and AI is trained on their work.

> I think you overestimate the ability of AI to write perfectly secure apps. Humans can't do it, and AI is trained on their work.

Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.

Let alone the issue when lots of meatbags with different skill levels are working on the same codebases.

I have barely seen any codebase that has been in production for a long time, that did not have glaring issues.

But if you tried to do a code audit, your spending somebody their time (assuming this is a pro), for a long time. Where as a AI with the correct hints on what too look for, can do insane levels of work, testing, etc...

Ironically, when you try to secure test a codebase, and you use multiple different LLMs, you get a very interesting list of issues they can find. Many that are probably in tons of production level software.

But its up to you, as the instructor of that LLM codebase, to actually tell it to do regular security audits of the codebase.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#108

Post by markbao »

noelsusman wrote: post #100
markbao wrote: post #92

Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc… The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisi…

A grocery list app is the perfect example of the kind of thing that AI will make obsolete. Why would I pay $5/month for a list app when I can pay Claude $0.30 one time to make it for me? I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It…

That is exactly the type of awesome app that can now be built. I edited my comment to clarify that the grocery app and $5/month app are separate examples, but I think your example shows that someone with coding knowledge can build something extremely useful for n=1 users which I fully support.

I just don’t think most people will end up doing that just like how most people don’t 3D print their own desk drawer organizers even when Gridfinity does all the work for you. Automation doesn’t fully replace the volition to build a thing and make tricky decisions that are familiar to us software engineers but not others.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#109

Post by tayo42 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #36
camdenreslink wrote: post #7

Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?

Addendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software? People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It wou…

Generating code isn't the bottleneck for selling software.

Those apps aren't that bad, it's just internet people complaining about things like react.

Imo "higher quality" isn't a way to sell software

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#110

Post by jkla562 »

mmaunder wrote: post #20

I fundamentally disagree with the premise: "The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies. We're already seeing this play out in the numbers. Apple's App Store got 557K new submissions in 2025, up 24% from 2024 (source: Appfigures). That's not because people suddenly got more creative. It's because building an…

This matches what I'm seeing. The AI tooling didn't make building cheaper — it made building fun again. The gap between idea and working prototype collapsed, and that's bringing a lot of experienced builders back off the sidelines.
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