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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#21

Post by OtomotO »

mettamage wrote: post #4

> 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 Yes and no. I have created 15 small apps that solves all kinds of things for me. However, at the department I work full of non-technical people, most of them don’t even know lovable exists. And for the one that does know lovable exists, they tend to build stuff w…

Exactly.

AI can produce mediocre or outright bad code no problem.

It was trained on the average, not just on Carmack level code...

It needs to be checked by a professional.

This won't ever change with LLMs or gen AI like it is now

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#22

Post by gruez »

chrisjj wrote: post #2

> 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. "AI", the new Napster.

Where's the analogy breaks down is that AI isn't producing verbatim copies. There's no expectation that dropbox should be protected from clones, for instance.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#23

Post by marioloko »

I think that even if everything can be copied, some platforms are still hard to copy, and some have greater barriers that are legal compliance, and others needs to be able to scale to be viable. Even if apps can be copied, the underlying architectural decisions are usually not so visible as the interface, and the developer should have a good knowledge of building architectures to add value to the existing apps.

My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#24

Post by onion2k »

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 what to write is where practically all the value lies (caveat: there is value in doing the same as someone else but better, or cheaper.) AI can help with that, but only in so much as telling you the basics or filling in the blanks if you're really stuck. It can't tell you the 'clever bit' because that is by definition new and interesting and doesn't appear in the training data.

What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#25

Post by neversupervised »

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…

Both are true. You’ll see innovation and you’ll see the cost of these very abundant simple apps go to zero. There’s no way around it. Supply and demand. Everyone can make apps, but there isn’t an obvious reason why people would be buying more apps. More apps made + same apps bought = cheaper apps.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#26

Post by vntok »

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?

How is that a counterpoint? Do these companies currently use as many SaaS as other companies? More importantly, will they do so in the future?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#27

Post by eterm »

MostlyStable wrote: post #12

I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months? [0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545

That essay was written weeks before Opus 4.5 was released which was an inflection point for the ability of Claude code and specifically how well it would work with less guidance.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#28

Post by ant6n »

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 that they can't read a simple PDF. Not following simple instructions.

It's like these companies are trying to get us hooked, then try to make us explode in frustration because it doesn't actually quite work. Not because the AI is bad, but because the interface (30-old-tech, a chat ui) is just broken.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#29

Post by kibwen »

No. Apple makes money from subscriptions, and Apple controls the app store with an iron fist. In a hypothetical world where the price of apps falls to ~free, Apple will just ban free apps in order to recoup that revenue. Hell, if you think that you can build apps for free, then you need to explain why Apple wouldn't do the same themselves, charge users a recurring fee for the privelige of using them, and then muscle out any competitors using their natural monopoly to reap the profits for themselves. Apple doesn't work for your benefit; like every other paperclip maximizer, they have a sociopathic focus on profit at all costs.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#30

Post by yellowapple »

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…

On top of that, it's one thing to write the code, whereas it's another to actually run that code with maximal reliability and minimal downtime. I'm sure LLMs can churn out Terraform all day long, but can they troubleshoot when something goes wrong (as is often the case)?
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