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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#51

Post by colesantiago »

barnabee wrote: post #38
LordHumungous wrote: post #31

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.

It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people. Good riddance to software subscriptions. I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).

Agreed, the abundance of many apps and the fact that subscriptions and paid apps are going to zero means anyone can make an app for themselves or use an open source one.

No need to pay for someone else’s one.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#52

Post by ethbr1 »

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…

> 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.

Bang on, and Jira is the perfect example! Because Jira isn't a bag of features: Jira is a list of features and the way they fit together (well or poorly, depending on your opinion).

That's the second-order product design that it's going to take next-gen coding AI workflows to automate. Mostly because that bit comes from user discovery, political arguments, sales prioritization, product vision, etc. It's a horrendous "art" of multi-variable zero-sum optimization.

When products get it right (early Slack) then it's invisible because "of course they made it do the thing I want to do."

When products get it wrong (MS Teams, Adobe Acrobat, Jira, HR platforms) then it's obvious features weren't composed well.

Expect there's more than one {user discovery} -> {product specification} AI startup out there, working on it in a hierarchical fashion with current AI now.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#54

Post by plagiarist »

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…

They're still training up using all of our extensive feedback to improve software architecture. Maybe later this year.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#55

Post by ninjagoo »

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…

> No. It's because people got more creative. There are tens of thousands of us who are absolutely on fire creating new products, better versions of old products, new product categories etc.

Nitpicking, but I would argue that people have always been creative, it's a function of our brains. With the ubiquity of camera, videos now show that even birds and animals have levels of creativity. Biological/physical/physics/societal restrictions prevent them from taking it to the next level. Look at what ancient peoples managed to achieve without the benefit of modern tools and techniques; hard to argue people haven't always been creative.

What has changed is the ability to implement our ideas and harness our creativity - that has become significantly simpler in the age of AI.

Perhaps the discrepancy between the OP's framing of what's happening (negative impact to developers because app cost has gone to zero) and your positive perspective (hey, look at all these creative ideas we are now implementing) is a matter of perspective: you're both describing the same phenomenon, just different angles.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#57

Post by colesantiago »

jitl wrote: post #18

i don’t agree. most apps i use are not AI clone-able yet with AI’s current faculties. i’m not going to switch to an ai vibe code of Google Photos, Tailscale/Mulvadd VPN, or YouTube. For those three apps, i pay for cloud infrastructure. sure, you can say with enough AI i could vibe code a Tailscale backend system, but it sounds like it would take more tokens than my $20/mo ChatGPT plan PLUS a mountain of cloud provide…

Yes they are easy to clone and for good reason.

Thanks to AI abundance, everyone will be better off.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#58

Post by KumaBear »

INTPenis wrote: post #39
dzonga wrote: post #33

I guess for the author's limited worldview - "apps" are only available through the app stores. could be an unfortunate thing of the author growing up in an era of gated ecosystems. however much of the software out there - is via web - and some desktop - some internal use - some external - some shit without ui - some billed yearly, some billed by subscriptions but I guess tell us how AI is gonna kill subscriptions

Actually I've been making several webapps with AI lately, for things I've always wished for and can now selfhost. At one point I had an idea I brought to AI, got ready to code it, then said "wait, someone has to have done this before me", sure enough, found it, written with warp! So I can't say it'll kill all app subscriptions, but AI is definitely enabling people to finally make reality out of that idea they've had…

As someone here with limited coding experience. I have built several custom applications that are too unique to be made by anyone. Now I can make several simple applications that do exactly what I need and want. It’s cut out hours of administrative work stuff I had to do. Do I share nope I gatekeep it at work. If only IT built these systems and databases to be easily used by us users.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#60

Post by neya »

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app.

I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and everything else.

Can AI do all that? Sure, but you must know to ask for all that in the first place. Look what happened to Clawd/Molt.

> It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude.

Sure, why don't you deploy your vibe coded app over the weekend and see if it falls apart after handling one request per second

This article was written by AI btw

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