AI is going to kill app subscriptions

Have you seen non-technical people use AI for anything beyond read my emails or add a column to my sheet?

Yes, the guy who owns a boat and wants to track his calories is going to fuck around in claude code and figure out deployment, and sign up to some free PaaS and pay $1.38 a month to self host their app.

Sure.

Open source should acquire greater, multiplied value once the new scaffolding is put into place. The open source community is still using the past approach, which is going to be largely washed away.

More people with more agents freely contributing more to even more concentrated and scaled-up projects.

Those agents will get more potent. The projects can get more ambitious.

One user with N Claude usage. 100 users with 100x the Claude usage. Who can build the superior product? If you put the right structure on it, the 100x wins by a drastic margin. Those 100x Claudes benefit in combination courtesy of the open source effect, their potential additive value is greatly enhanced.

The 1x outcome will end up being relegated to triviality (the one page homepage as website). The bar is about to be raised really, really, really high in software if you want to be relevant. This is merely a very short transition period.

There's a whole class of SAAS that's relatively well protected and that is everything that has to do with proprietry, hard to get data. For example a big cyber company like CrowdStrike could (and probably does) decare that its impossible to clone its cyber solution because their solutions and algorithms were trained on and improved on tons of clients data. So there's that - the data moat. Other than that I suppose everything that's a pain in the butt to duplicate - lots of regulation, tax codes etc etc. Think Shopify for instance, it's not just cloning the UI and some CRUD you need to clone a whole shitload of boring backend work that deals with this shit - and then keep a bunch of agents to constanty supervise regulation and update the software (And perhaps have a few humans overseeing the whole process); is it worth having the agents + few humans in the loop over paying for Shopify ? Currently - I doubt it. When agent costs plummet to almost zero and you dont need any humans in the loop - yes, probably worth it. We're not there yet.

I think the article has some truth but the author also ignores something important. Yes, subscription costs are going down. But there's a big difference between consumer and enterprise. Everyone needs to build fast now. A company cannot get distracted by building capabilities in-house that are not core to their product. This was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow. That means they will keep paying for quality solutions and not settle for sub-par solutions just because someone made them for free (there was always an open source solution available long before AI entered the scene). I may argue that not settling is even more important now that moving fast is key.

For a company, paying $10K a year for a quality service, that's a no-brainer. Most companies spend that money on alcohol in company onsites. However, if you're charging really high prices (the Datadogs of the world), then you're going to face tougher competition from cheaper alternatives that might be as good as you, and when companies need to cut costs, which they often do, you'll be in trouble.

I think what it means to many software companies is that prices will significantly go down on average but the median might not see significant decrease. Companies will be smaller and more lean, hiring less people in general (not just engineers!). There will be more companies out there, so hopefully it will even out.

Last thing is that every product will have too many options to choose from. This has been the reality actually for a long time and going to get much worse. How you market and brand your product and acquire customers will become more difficult than ever.

Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does it.