Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is going to kill app subscriptions

nichehunt.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 250 posts

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#221

Post by barnabee »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #201
barnabee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy the support argument for companies. I also buy the argument that a lot of time people are actually paying for cloud storage. While I'd love to see a generic protocol for cloud or self-hosted storage that every app can sync to, I expect we'll continue to see subscription software persist by locking down and gatekeeping cloud storage and sync, too. But really I would be happy for that to go away. I don't use much…

>The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself. This works for some software (developer tools is the prime example) but not so much for other things. Who is going to maintain the MTD software I used for my VAT returns without recompense. Who is going to update the PAYE payroll software I relied on. Even with developer tools I…

> Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.

Most people in most situations pay as little as they can get away with not as much as they value the product or service.

The only time this is arguably somewhat untrue is when the point of having the thing is to signal wealth, but even someone buying e.g. a Rolex wants to do so as cheaply as possible, so it's only really true when they're directly spending the money in front of people (think bar, restaurant, nightclub, etc.)

I agree that right now it's mostly developer tools that are doing best in terms of open source. But browsers, operating systems, 3D modelling software, image/photo editing, and many others are not so far behind either.

My assertion/belief[0], though, is that the direction of travel is for open source to become dominant in more and more classes of software, especially as AI reduces the cost of contribution and collaboration, and disincentivises closed, proprietary software.

[0] Based on what I and others around me have been able to do with AI already and how fast it is moving.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#222

Post by ToucanLoucan »

redhale wrote: post #216

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free. There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of t…

It's just the same community of people who believe they are unable/it is beneath them to acquire skills because of some impending super-automation that will let them do everything great that they have envisioned but have previously been stifled by the aforementioned lack of skills moving from one hype-bubble to the next.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#223

Post by rglover »

Not for technical reasons, but because it enables the masses to flood the market with low-quality software. Eventually people just won't bother because there's too much junk to wade through (and no reliable method of curation/validation).

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#224

Post by Aerroon »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #36
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?

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…

Why aren't we in the year of the Linux desktop? It's free and arguably close enough, better, or as good as Windows.

I think in the modern world people would absolutely sell the special shovel, because even if you have a better product that doesn't mean people are going to be using it. You need to have a much better product for a long time for that to happen. And being much better than the competition is hard.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#225

Post by phito »

rglover wrote: post #223

Not for technical reasons, but because it enables the masses to flood the market with low-quality software. Eventually people just won't bother because there's too much junk to wade through (and no reliable method of curation/validation).

Definitely this, my hobby is already filled with a ton of sloppy vibe coded apps that all do the same thing very badly with awful UI/UX. They all ask for a monthly subscription and, surprise, nobody uses them.

Meanwhile the hand crafted app that does the same thing gets put in the same bucket as the AI slop ones and is ignored.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#226

Post by CamperBob2 »

Kbelicius wrote: post #209
CamperBob2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology People were saying that a decade ago, if not more, with machine learning outperforming radiologists. Today we don't have enough radiologists. What has changed since those days that one can again say that so confidently?

The difference is that the models now work. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot has happened since "a decade ago."

Some of the recent studies showing otherwise are literal junk science. They used flawed methodologies, such as blindly feeding the data to the models without access to medical histories that the human doctors would have benefited from (which favored the human radiologists substantially) and leaving labels on the training data (which favored the models.) When studies are conducted under more rigorous standards, the humans don't tend to win, and unlike the models the humans will not get better.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#227

Post by CamperBob2 »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #197
CamperBob2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Claude write me an app to do air traffic control. Make sure planes don’t crash. Here is a hundred years of rules and their context.”

Video game AI from 20 years ago was already good enough to perform ATC at an algorithmic level. It's not a difficult problem, if approached as a system, because there are no surprises left in the field. Every situation that will ever need to be handled by ATC has either been encountered and understood by now, or can reasonably be anticipated and modeled, making it a good candidate for automation.

The problem -- like self-driving cars that generally outperform humans but aren't allowed on the roads because occasionally they still screw up -- is primarily political, not technical. A rational point of view wouldn't demand perfect performances from machines that were never achieved by humans in the first place. Eventually lawmakers and regulators will get that through their heads, and we'll all be better off for it... but the transition will be a rough one.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#228

Post by lpnam0201 »

signatoremo wrote: post #183
chickenimprint wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ? To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#229

Post by [deleted] »

rubb3rDucc wrote: post #145
markbao wrote: post #92

Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc… The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisi…

This thread hits very close to home for me. I'm engineering the frontend for a grocery list app as a capstone project right now and I'm handling a lot of the product and feature decisions, and the discussion about "just prompt Claude to build it" versus the reality of those decisions is something my team deals with constantly. The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution…

[deleted]

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#230

Post by KevinMS »

> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

There are free PDF editors, but that hasn't changed the fact people pay for them. I don't think this is going to work out like the article thinks it is, unless AI is really easy to use, and does a very good job, but there's always going to be that last 5% of quality that people will want to pay for.

Post reply on HN