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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

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Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#261

Post by bryanrasmussen »

sjw987 wrote: post #252
rhubarbtree wrote: post #233

You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development. This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for. Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of stati…

This seems like an incredibly defensive take for vibe coding personal apps. Replacing some subscription app like Any.do, Google Calendar, fitness/diet tracking or basically any other CRUD-centric app, needn't be insecure, and a semi-competent developer can easily host it, continue further development (with or without vibe coding) and secure it. There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves usin…

>There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves using many of these apps with active subscriptions to make their own, tailored for themselves, and cut down their spending.

I guess if you're unemployed or in an area with spectacularly low wages, and don't have any ideas of your own that seem monetizable.

>Most people will continue spending $1.00/month here, and $2.99/month there.

If I make 100 dollars an hour as a consultant, and I spend 1 hour to make a local version that never needs any updating on my part to replicate a portion of that functionality I get for $1.00/month, it will take me 101 months to see any profit on my investment of time.

Cut my pay in half and I still need 51 months to see any profit. It would be idiotic for me to waste 1 hour on that.

And let's face it, code when made is a cost center, you will have to keep it up to date (so as to not introduce security hazards etc.) you will never break even much less earn anything for your time.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#262

Post by withinboredom »

pixl97 wrote: post #89
lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping the lights on is fine. But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back. If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it. If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this. If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this. Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.

Yep. At one point I expected the software I needed to work for a reasonable time range, possibly up to a decade. Best if you could buy it once and use it from then on. Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.

> Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions

So much this. Each subscription is literally a small percentage of your revenue. You can't reinvest it ... it's just gone. Hopefully it enables more productivity ... but most likely, it is only marginal.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#263

Post by theshrike79 »

lelanthran wrote: post #257
theshrike79 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how you define "production". People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore. All it needs is the maker mindset of being just lazy enough to be bothered by a repetitive task and the courage (and permission) to use an Agentic LLM to figure out a fix for the issue.

> People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore. Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, t…

Deterministic but also very fragile. Excel _still_ doesn't have unit tests or linters.

Someone can accidentally type a static number in place of a formula and it may stick there for years.

Or Excel decides that a name of a gene is a date: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

Or Excel silently losing important health data: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

None of these would've happened with a vibe-coded bespoke tool. A basic elementary level unit test would've caught them instantly.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#264

Post by agos »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #7
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…

Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess. Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating…

regardless of whether an app _does_ ongoing development. there's plenty of examples - especially mobile - of apps switching to subscriptions and simultaneously slowing down development, which is maddening

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#265

Post by daliusd »

Spivak wrote: post #206
robofanatic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! It’s like I saw you selling pre-cut fruit for $7 so I decided to cut my own fruit every week.

I think the difference is I was buying pre-cut fruit for $7 every week so I spent two days and now my fruit magically cuts itself forever. He turned an ongoing expense into a one time expense. And bonus he likely had fun doing the labor.

In some cases, that’s true, but sometimes you need to update cutting rules because of law changes, or you saw different way of cutting for example. There are cases where this is not one time investment. What I agree with that cutting-it-yourself became significantly cheaper

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#267

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.

Probably not.

I also paid for FreeFileSync (the donation version) instead of rolling my own local backups (across drives), as well as MobaXTerm because I really like their UI/UX and so on. Software that others have developed and supported for multiple years, which has been already tested by a lot of folks thoroughly across their usecases is probably a good bet, doubly so if you can buy it (or I guess choose to support the devs) instead of renting it, the difference being that in the latter case you're not in control.

At the same time, 30 USD gets you about (assuming 85 input and 15 output split, which approximately matches my stats across months):

  * Gemini 3 Pro:  8.57M tokens (7.29M input, 1.29M output)
  * GPT 5.2:       8.36M tokens (7.11M input, 1.25M output)
  * Sonnet 4.5:    6.25M tokens (5.31M input, 0.94M output)
From: https://pricepertoken.com/

(actual figures would change with the input/output proportion, it matters a lot, and also any caching)

Not really enough to build serious software, but definitely quite the bit of help along the way!

Or if you go with subscriptions, it can vary even more, even if will cap how much you can do per day.

For example, if you pay 50 USD for Cerebras Code, you get 24M tokens per day, so that'd be close to 730M tokens per month. They're running GLM 4.7 which isn't SOTA in my experience, but is somewhere around Sonnet 4 and therefore actually quite capable: https://z.ai/blog/glm-4.7 (my experience might not match the benchmarks, but either way it can be good enough for most stuff out there)

For a decent percentage of software development, maybe where you want a feature nobody else out there has, AI can help you get rid of enough friction and lend enough help along the way, to maybe make it worthwhile. The caveat there might be that you have to treat the expense of your own time as something you do for the enjoyment of it (building something, or the delayed gratification of benefitting from using the software).

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#269

Post by retsibsi »

throwup238 wrote: post #203
retsibsi wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder Agreed, but the confusing part is that you don't seem to be saying "to me, those services only provide X amount of value, and I'd rather have $Y than that" -- you seem to be saying that if 1password and Fastmail were more expensive, you might be willing to pay the asking price for some of those services you currently consider bad value.

You’re absolutely right! If Fastmail or 1password charged more for their services, the bar for what I consider good value would be different. Those two services are _absolutely_ worth more to me than they currently charge and I’d be happy to pay. But they don’t, which is why I use them as my baseline. If my email provider and password manager - two services with damn near infinite vendor lockin - can do it, no one ha…

Which is your choice, obviously, but you can see why people would find it strange -- it seems like you're potentially just leaving value on the table for an arbitrary reason. The price of Fastmail doesn't affect the value you would get from some unrelated product, so surely that other product is either worth the asking price or not worth it regardless of how much Fastmail is charging.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#270

Post by sjw987 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #261
sjw987 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an incredibly defensive take for vibe coding personal apps. Replacing some subscription app like Any.do, Google Calendar, fitness/diet tracking or basically any other CRUD-centric app, needn't be insecure, and a semi-competent developer can easily host it, continue further development (with or without vibe coding) and secure it. There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves usin…

>There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves using many of these apps with active subscriptions to make their own, tailored for themselves, and cut down their spending. I guess if you're unemployed or in an area with spectacularly low wages, and don't have any ideas of your own that seem monetizable. >Most people will continue spending $1.00/month here, and $2.99/month there. If I make 100 do…

And if they simply want something tailored for themselves?

Something designed without content suggestions, ads, influence and constant un-necessary redesigns, for privacy and to retain their own data.

Good for you economically. Some people are unemployed and underpaid. In fact, most are. Half of your post just came across as you broadcasting your economic success.

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