Comment by kylecazar
5 days ago
Yeah. Part of why this is possible is simply that there are tons of subscription apps out there that were never really justified in requiring a recurring payment and are actually fairly trivial.
It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that.
I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.
The subscription craze is getting worse where often the features I need are locked behind a recurring fee costing hundreds to thousands of dollars over its useful lifetime, or are only available in 'enterprise' versions where the sales people laugh me off for not having $30k to spend and won't even let me trial the software (because inevitably I'll just RE it and make a crack)
The most recent example is I wanted a simple home security system with presence detection and a private control panel, none of the free ones hit my requirements, or require custom hardware, or lock you into a cloud, or assume you can spin-up some containers - or are super enterprise grade stuff.
Within about 2 days I had an android app for my tablet, Google FMDN integration, fingerprinting of my other devices, all controllable via Telegram from any of my phones with alerts that "just work" wherever I am and include an inline gif snapshot.
What I wanted didn't really exist as any individual product, so I absolutely see the appeal of DIY vibe-coded stuff, and a day of the build time was optimizing the OpenGL motion-detection pipeline with shaders & DMA which in itself was good to learn about.
What I fear is a pollution of the open source space with tons of tailored apps that have a lot of overlap, but none of them get meaningful contributions because the maintainer will most likely respond with wontfix to almost everything (if they respond at all).
I build in the open, but what I build is just for me. If someone wants to fork it and modify it, they can go ahead - pretty much all of my stuff is MIT licensed by default.
But I'm not going to start adding features to my bespoke utility to fix someone else's problem.
Shrug, it's hard to have an open app where everyone wants to add/change something and not have it turn into a Turing machine that attempts to do everything.
Sometimes you just want an app does X and Y, but not A, B and Z.
Most users expect everything to be cloud these days. In the cross-stitching community (which is mostly older non-technical folk), the amount of people that get mad every day because the most popular app is local-only, is phenomenal. What do you MEAN they smashed their device, bought a new one, and all their WIP projects aren't there anymore?
> Most users expect everything to be cloud these days.
No way. Maybe most Linux users. MacOS, iOS, Android, and probably Windows users are all app-first.
Was reminiscing about the early iOS App Store days when many apps were free and often hobby projects. Some hooked up google ads to make a nice easy profit if they stumbled on a particularly good early app idea. I don't really find apps like that anymore, or at least they don't really get shared the same way. Maybe this is a return to that in a sense.
I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.