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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#171

Post by pydry »

ethbr1 wrote: post #62
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…

Anthropic appears to have realized before OpenAI that code gen was an important enough market to specialize in. For now though, building smarter models / general integration tooling is a better us of model companies' capital. Once/if performance gains plateau, expect you'll see them pivot right quick to in-house software factories for easily cloneable, large TAM product spaces, then spin off those products if they're…

For the time being though, theyre going to build their in house software with electron because building native apps is hard.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#173

Post by informal007 »

Another reason that push to kill subscription is that many users just want software that actually works forever—no subscriptions, no ads. That’s why so many of us prefer one-time purchases. I’m definitely in that camp. I stick to local-first apps because I know they won't get worse over time.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#174

Post by prinny_ »

sovietmudkipz wrote: post #3

I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.” App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probabl…

I believe we are having this discussion from a purely technical perspective and not from a business one. Let's take slack for example. Assuming a company can perfectly clone it, why would they? Yes they would skip paying for it, but they would have to maintain it, starting from its infrastructure all they way up to its UI. Will they think of new features? Will they follow industry developments in sound / streaming technology? Will they keep integrating other tools into it? I am sure they would rather pay to have somebody else do it for them, someone like slack itself.

Also, assuming a company has the capital to burn through enough tokens to create something so big and complex, why spend it on an internal tool? Shouldn't they be spinning slack-sized apps to expand their existing market share or try to disrupt new markets?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#175

Post by dasil003 »

This is absolute nonsense. The app stores are already saturated with tons of free apps that no one uses. Sure the numbers are up—10x of infinity is still infinity—and the reason Apple doesn't care is because this is just the natural end game of their strategy to commoditize their complement.

When it comes to software subscriptions, the bar is just that much higher. Not only do you have to pass the threshold for someone to even adopt another app/website/brand, but now you have to provide enough utility to pay for it. Claude spitting out code for a good-enough clone of an app doesn't come anywhere near the threshold. An agent that can write the code, buy a domain, provision and maintain the database, and submit the app to the app store gets closer, but now it's not looking so cheap anymore, moreso in terms of your time commitment as defacto product manager than actual tokens and hosting costs.

The actual disruption of SaaS apps will come from agents that are capable of solving problems autonomously in a different way such that you don't even need the SaaS. I'm sure we'll get there in time, but not without a lot of data integrity and security issues, and rogue agent fuckups along the way.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#176

Post by deterministic »

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?

... and why are they still loosing billions of $? Surely their AI can help them (say) generate good biz models? :-)

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#177

Post by chickenimprint »

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.

Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business".

Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#180

Post by bsder »

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?

Because SaaS at the corporate level is about liability transfer first and any value or functionality is a distant second.
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