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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#121

Post by camdenreslink »

hxugufjfjf wrote: post #65
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.

But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it.

They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.

It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#122

Post by notahacker »

neon_me wrote: post #83

Subscription is not about app ownership, but mostly running the infra. AI is going to make basically everything even more expensive and subscription based. Your point is based on wrong assumptions.

Yeah. There's a power law distribution in successful apps. The valuable ones wrap content, networks, products your enterprise is subscribed to, or at least rank ahead of similar themed games or an abundance of free with ads clones in an App Store as the "everybody uses this, it just works and you can share with them too" solution.

Sucks for the todo-list-for-x and pretty basic game app creators to have even more competition, but they weren't making bank from subscriptions anyway

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#123

Post by fzaninotto »

I don't agree with the premise that we pay a subscription because there is no better and cheaper alternative. We pay Slack subscriptions but we could get IRC for free. We pay Google Drive subscription but we could get rsync for free.

The reason we pay a subscription is because the company that built the software knows our business, knows how to get in touch with the decision maker, and knows how to market their product as something desirable. The actual software has little influence in that decision.

On the contrary, I think the price of SaaS subscriptions will go up as a result of AI. Because the only customers who will switch to a cheaper (or home made) alternative are the ones for whom the software is a commodity. These customers used to form the long tail of subscriptions, usually on the lower tier. When the entry pricer disappears, and the software editor has to generate a high return for their investors, the only way to keep profitability is to increase the price for the other tiers.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#124

Post by esafak »

ej88 wrote: post #61
onion2k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would posit another large factor is "owning" the software comes with the long tail of edge cases, bugs, support, on-call, regulations, etc... that an established SaaS has learned and iterated on for many years with many customers. For the vast majority of companies they would (and should) rather let the SaaS figure that out and focus on their actual company

It seems people are forgetting that companies should develop their differentiators and pay for the rest.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#125

Post by orwin »

benjiro wrote: post #107
SoftTalker wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Sentences like this make me think AI is honestly the best thing that happened for my imposter syndrome. AI is great for simulating test case, and that's it. If you leave it, it write the most basic, useless tests (i mean, half of them might be usefull when you refactor, but that's about it). It can't design reusable test components and have trouble with test double, which i would think is the easiest test case for AI. Even average devs like me write test double faster than AI, and i'm shit at writing tests.

AI is also extremely bad at understanding versionning, and will use a deprecated API for no reason except increasing the surface of attack.

AI is great for writing CLI scripts, boilerplate and autocomplete. I use it for frontend because i'm shit at it (even though i have to clean its shit up behind), and to rewrite small functionalities of some libraries i want to avoid loading (which allowed us to remove legacy dependencies). It's good at writing prototypes (my main use nowadays), and a very good way to use it is to ask it a plan to improve/factorize your code (it's _very_ bad at factorizing, but as it recognize patterns, it is able to suggest interesting refactors. Half the time it's wrong, so use the "plan" mode)

I'm on a network security and cybersecurity tooling team, i guarantee you AI is shit at securing the code (and at understanding network).

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#127

Post by neya »

colesantiago wrote: post #89
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…

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.

> the gatekeeping has now been removed

Nobody gatekept anything. The software, tools, knowledgebase (MIT, Coursera, etc) were always there. It was a choice. Some of us chose it, rest didn't for whatever reason.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#128

Post by hackingonempty »

colesantiago wrote: post #89
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…

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.

> gatekeeping has now been removed

Who was preventing you from learning how to do it yourself and then doing it?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#129

Post by benjiro »

barnabee wrote: post #38
LordHumungous wrote: post #31

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.

It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people. Good riddance to software subscriptions. I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).

> Good riddance to software subscriptions.

Counter argument ... at what point is software still profitable to be sold?

I am running my Office 2007 still, and that thing is now almost 20 years old. That was a one time sale, with no other revenue for Microsoft.

I am not condoning subscriptions but one time selling software only works good, if your a small team with low overhead. The more you sell, the more support becomes a issue. And normal customers do not pay for support.

Making software now has become easier with LLMs but the same problem keeps existing in regards to support. Sure, you can outsource this to LLMs but lets just say that is problematic (being kind).

So unless you plan on making software that is not heavily supported/updated, and keep a low single/team cost...

If you sold a program for a one time fee of ... $39.

What if somebody now sells the same for $29 with LLMs. And the next guy in China does it even cheaper because his overhead is even smaller. Eventually you get into abandonware where software is made to just eat sales from the bigger guy and that is it.

Unless you focus on companies, and they have way less issue paying for subscriptions (if it includes support). You see the issue. People kind of overlook the cost of actually running a self employed job or a company (this is a MAJOR cost the moment you need to hire somebody).

So no, i do not see subscriptions going away because companies will pay for it. And on the normal consumer level, paid support as the solution?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#130

Post by eddythompson80 »

wiether wrote: post #98
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…

> see if it falls apart after handling one request per second Most of the problems you talk about are problems if you intend your software to be used at scale. If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters? People used to do this in an Excel sheet. Now they can ask Claude to make them a nice UI similar to MFP or whatever. Data can be stored in a s…

> If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?

They don't, it's just annoying as shit when things break at the worst time for lack of these "best practices" and you know that the only answer will be "do better". I'll give you an example. Years ago I migrated a lot of my app usage to selfhosted OSS apps for all the reasons one might list them. I did like 80% of what I perceived as the "important best practices". Setup ZFS with redundancy to handle drive failures, a UPS for power interruption, wireguard for secure access, docker for application and dependencies isolation, etc.

But there were always things I just thought "I should probably do that, but later. This is just for me"

It would be the end of the day, I'm tired and on bed wanting to just chill and watch something on my ipad, and what do you know my plex is down, again.

Why does it go down every few days? Now I need to go get a laptop, ssh into my server, docker logs. See a bunch of exceptions. I don't want to debug it today. Just restart it, ok it works again. Go to bed, start watching.

20 minutes in.. I think it's down again.. wtf? get the laptop again, google the error, something about sqlite db on an NFS share not being very stable. All my ZFS storage is only exposed as NFS and SMB share to another machine.. Ok, just restart and hope it works and I'll deal with it latter.

Forget for a couple of days. I'm with a friend as her place and want to watch again, and fuck me I never fixed the sqlite issue, nevermind lets just watch netflix.

Over the weekend, I'm determined to get this fixed. Move the application folder out of NFS on the local machine SSD. It doesn't have redundancy, but it's ok for now. I'll setup an rsync job to copy it to the NFS share in case the SSD fails. I just want to see if it'll be stable.

Few months pass, and it's been pretty stable until I have a power outage. The UPS was there, but the configuration to notify the OS to shutdown broke a while ago and I didn't notice. Files on ZFS are fine, but the some on the local SSD got corrupted and I didn't notice, including plex database. the rsync job just copied the corrupted file over the "backup" file.

It's late at night again, and I just want to relax and watch something and discover this happened. I could try to figure out how to recover it, but it's probably easier to just do a clean scan. It's gonna take hours. Lets just start it and go to sleep.

Later, lets just migrate everything to jellyfin. Have auto upgrade setup because I'm smart. Jellyfin 10.8 updates and unfavorites all the facorited music tracks. "You have backups right". "Well, yes I do. Let me make sure I have an evening cleared so I can setup another instance of jellyfin, run the old backups, export the favorite list, and import it in the new one"... oh there is no way to do that? I guess I can export it to CSV, get a plugin to automate it for me. the plugin hasn't been updated to 10.8 but there is a pull request. ok lets wait. Forget that I setup restic to delete backups older than 30 days. fuck me. I have the CSV somewhere I think. God my `/tmp` is ephemeral and I hope I haven't rebooted since then. phew it's there. fuck me still.

I have worked in managing services for most of my career. I know what I'm doing wrong. I need to setup monitoring, alerts, health checks, 321 backups (not just rsync to a zfs pool) and actually use a backup software that tracks file versions, off site redundancy, dashboards for anomaly detection, scheduled hardware upgrades and checks for memtest, disk health, UPS configuration checks. I know how 3 or 4 9s are achieved in the industry.

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