Your app subscription is now my weekend project • Hacker News Board

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#211

Post by figers » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:20 AM UTC

sjw987 wrote: post #74

3rodents wrote: post #44

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year.…

Making your own software is a good way to escape enshittification and influence. I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour. Most apps are very simple and there isn't too…

I did MP3s on my plex server for a while but with endless new music added to my playlists it became a hassle and Apple Music was just convenient and Shazam adding any song I hear and like is just too easy...it also plays perfectly on my Apple Watch over cellular when I go for a run, but everyone has their own use case and where they want to spend their time...

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#212

Post by csomar » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

Most (all?) of these examples are products where the product is the UX not the functionality. macOS has dictation, there are free screen recording apps and you can use a normal text editor for your blog. There is no need to create a half-assed software that you don't understand and might break unpredictably at some point when there are free alternatives; and even open source ones you can download today.

The interesting question is why the OP had bought these subscriptions in the first place if he was happy with less-polished alternatives.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#213

Post by figers » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #51

_def wrote: post #14

I get that this is tempting but it just means you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix. And disaster recovery is most certainly a manual task.

Why would they "eventually break"? In what situation would a simple script or helper app just suddenly rot away and stop working? Of course it's POSSIBLE to vibe together a massive monstrosity of an everything-app, but that's not what the author is doing here (nor me).

If it's tied to web APIs, libraries, or OS version feature APIs that are deprecated it will suddenly stop working.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#214

Post by raincole » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:31 AM UTC

Shank wrote: post #5

First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…

> First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free.

Yes, but it's almost one time payment. Your own personal use case is usually narrow enough, and you don't need to support different OS/browsers. You can vibe code it and just forget the fact it's coded.

Actually it's the best use case for vibe coding (the strict meaning of this word) - when you don't plan to maintain the codebase anyway.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#215

Post by raincole » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:35 AM UTC

ffitch wrote: post #123

Building (or vibecoding) a markdown editor for a single user and their specific use case, for a 100 users, and for 10,000 users takes different amount of time and effort. In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of users. Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good…

> In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of user

And then put it on an app store and put all the vital features behind $15/mo subscription.

Which is totally justified! I understand the time and energy needed to get a product polished for 10,000 users. But thanks, I will take my vibe coded one.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#216

Post by raincole » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:38 AM UTC

3rodents wrote: post #44

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year.…

> Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.

No one is doing that. In foreseeable future I don't see people making their own OSs, browsers and drivers. Workplaces never ditched Offices and Windows for the open source counterparts and they are certainly not going to do that for vibe coded solutions.

You can rest assured.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#217

Post by sandspar » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

sim04ful wrote: post #49

The prevalence of this "personal vibecoded app" spirit makes me start to wonder if an "App" is the right level of abstraction for packaging capabilities. Perhaps we need something more "granular".

Personally I hope we land on "widget" although I'd settle for "thingamabob"

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#218

Post by gabriel-uribe » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

I'm very bullish on vibe coding generally, but I dont expect this will become a trend.

Most people don't make or maintain their own things, period. Vibe coding will mostly cannibalize expensive B2B contracts from a pre-LLM era where integrations and maintenance were expensive.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#219

Post by sandspar » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 6:16 AM UTC

philipwhiuk wrote: post #23

I think there's still an underestimated burden to vibe-coding an app for a non-software engineer. I'm not recommending my parents vibe-code apps to solve problems, so I think the market is smaller. But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.

I assume the learning curve will get shallower over time. Onboarding is better than ever and will only improve. Lots of 70 and 80 year olds on Facebook now, and future Facebooks will verbally handhold you as you log on. "Press the red button that I just highlighted... great job!" etc.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#220

Post by prmoustache » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 6:18 AM UTC

alt187 wrote: post #193

mannyv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is free, but you pay for it with your time. And calling Windows and MacOS a tax is a complete misunderstanding of what a tax actually is.

> Linux is free, but you pay for it with your time. People like to repeat this thought terminating cliché because they think it makes them sound smart and insightful, to doubt that a free thing is really free. But it's an uniquely naive opinion. On Windows or MacOS, it's more often than not that, when you meet a problem, the only thing you can do is throw your hands into the air, and suffer the problem. This is payin…

The days of compiling kernel module to have your adsl modem working or copy/pasting modelines in an xfree86config files have been over for well over 15 years anyway.

You don't fiddle more in Linux than you do in MacOs or Windows nowadays and that screen recorder tool he had to spend time vibecoding is embedded in the desktop already, the rest of the apps are 2 clicks away from being installed.