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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#181

Post by robocat »

deterministic wrote: post #176
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? :-)

Correction: the investors lose billions (and perhaps their customers and/or suppliers lose billions too).

The companies don't lose anything. The employees and executives are not losing anything.

Welcome to business.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#182

Post by chasd00 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #78
andsoitis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salient point is it is becoming easier and easier for end-users to create apps for their use cases, rather than having to rely on a developer, or packaged apps.

The implicit point here is that devtools-type standardization subscriptions are about to get juiced. Think Vercel, Supabase, et al. Because most of the time agents prefer glueing together managed services than building from scratch, unless they're told otherwise. And if I'm someone building a custom in-house solution to replace a SaaS subscription product, I'm going to pay lower managed costs without blinking.

Idk I was using Claude code this weekend to do some experimenting with supabase. Claude code had no issue integrating supabase into my application and even do the schema and rls setup. I think supabase is safe because it’s managed, has plenty of features, and the agents know it. That may be the key to saas survival, do the agents know about your service and how to integrate it into their work? …man that sounds scary just replace “agents” with “software devs” in my last sentence. It’s a crazy world.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#183

Post by signatoremo »

chickenimprint wrote: post #177
hxugufjfjf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#184

Post by plagiarist »

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

AI can allegedly do all of those. Except perhaps it cannot be trusted with regulations, since that one has consequences for doing poorly.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#185

Post by qnleigh »

I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself.

This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have staying power. Ironically, the flood of cheap, low quality AI generated apps might make it harder for cheap apps to overtake bigger players, because overall trust in the ecosystem will go down.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#186

Post by CamperBob2 »

qnleigh wrote: post #185

I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself. This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have…

It's early days yet. You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology, if you were just starting out as a freshly-minted MD. And yes, this is going to be a problem, possibly a big one.

See also: air traffic control.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#187

Post by dangus »

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 Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does.

If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?

Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?

What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?

Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?

Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#188

Post by dangus »

deafpolygon wrote: post #170

Honestly, AI is just going to accelerate app subscriptions. Since it costs nothing to build now, you can just make your own SaaS and charge some money.

All of these people predicting the death of SaaS are going to look incredibly silly in 5-10 years.

If it’s easier to build software, that means there will be more software. Duh.

Henry Ford didn’t kill off cars because he perfected the moving assembly line, quite the opposite.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#189

Post by [deleted] »

ant6n wrote: post #28

I think AI is going to kill my sanity. But mostly, because the websites are so bad. It's just a chat interface, but apparently nobody knows how to write those anymore. They use 1GB of memory per instance, slow to load, UI constantly crashes. Then Gemini loses all context when you stop and edit a reply. Then the bots themselves with their hallucination, their gaslighting, their covering up of mistakes, covering up tha…

[deleted]

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#190

Post by belZaah »

The premise here seems to be, that the code is where the value is created. That’s maybe true for some apps but not every one. Apps can facilitate interactions (eg Training Peaks), store data long term (eg MyFitnessPal) or act as a part of a complex network of complementary goods (eg Garmin Connect). The last part is especially important: the ability to create something does not necessarily mean the ability to gain value from it.
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