Comment by Shank
1 day ago
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 $30 of my time.
But for an app whose use case doesn’t change and is recurring for no reason? Yeah there’s probably not much value in recurring payments outside of wanting to support the developer. I pay a lot of indie devs out of the goodness of my heart, and I’ll continue to do that.
But the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.
What's actually going on here is the Unix Philosophy applied to more and more platforms.
Previously, if you wanted to rig up a screen recording app in a few minutes you'd use Linux and specifically one of the minimal desktop environments like i3 or sway. Then you'd wire up a few command line utilities (slurp, wf-recorder, etc) and get the exact experience you want. These small unix tools allowed the greater ecosystem to just cobble together what they wanted without too much hassle. I've done exactly this!
This is the exact mindset that keeps people away. They'd prefer to NOT maintain their own video recording software THANK YOU VERY MUCH. So you get people who go to Mac OS because there's always a slick solution for a couple bucks and you never have to be TOO fiddly.
This doesn't destroy the market for people in the latter camp, but it DOES open up the market for people in the former.
Some of this "I can do it for free" stuff gives me the vibes of people who monitor gas prices every day. Only to drive 10 miles out of their way to save $0.30 a gallon filing their 15 gallon tank ($4.50 savings - $2.00 gas used - $X for time). They probably also buy an overpriced drink/snack for a net negative value proposition even if time is free.
Some of these things are the feeling of "getting a deal" or "screwing the system" and people can spend their time in whatever way brings them joy. I don't want to be a "markdown editor app developer" or whatever and would rather work on more creative endeavors. In the end, we give our time to get money and then trade our money for time but time is our only limited resource.
I'm one of those guys you speak of, that would do that fully knowingly. The point is principle. If I feel I'm being exploited, then I will refuse to deal with something/somebody even if it's in my own short term best interest. It's not really screwing the system so much as screwing people trying to screw me, and I find the satisfaction that gives me as being worth substantially more than whatever I might lose in money. For a less self motivated reason, if all of society behaved like this - the world would also be a much better place.
More generally, I don't view time as some resource to be used to achieve some ultimate goal. In the end the only goal we're going to achieve is death. So in the interim I'd rather do actions that give me satisfaction rather than those that give me money, because in the end - the point of that money is to bring satisfaction anyhow, so I'm just cutting out the middle man.
These parties aren’t screwing you. They’re offering a service at a price. You pay for convenience. You may not value your time, but most do. That’s why certain gas stations command a higher price.
'screwing the people who want to screw you' is a losing game. You're spending time you could spend doing something positive doing something that just arouses negative emotion.
Weekend projects are fun and a great way to experiment with new technologies. AI is this new technology and most engineer should be familiar with how useful it is and it's limitations.
Sure, if you hate coding it's prob not worth it. But I don't see it as an expense. In fact I value it so I would even not go as far as to deem a failure as a loss.
How are you completely disregarding the data integrity and privacy aspects of rolling your own tools?
I vibecode an app that only I use and store data locally. That means my data never leaves my device, I never have to share my email with anyone, never have to enter my credit card info anywhere
You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godknows what security practices
That’s worth more than the cost of any tokens
> You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godknows what security practices
I'm speaking more about fake SaaS "we have an app and we charge monthly for it and license it." Obviously, a tool with cloud-based storage and sharing will be a different beast.
But do you trust a vibe coded app to do cloud-based storage and sharing better than a company or an indie developer? If you need these functions (like sharing a todo list between two users), you have a lot more concerns than "does it boot".
If I vibe coded it? Absolutely. I can definitively answer what S3 buckets are in use, and that public access is disabled! Like, that parts really really not that hard, and people keep fucking it up. Plus the threat model for the Todo so that my small friends/family group uses is totally different from the problems google keep faces.
But that's cheating because I do this stuff professionally. Would I trust a vibe coded Todo app my uncle's son Jimmy who smoke a lot of pot uses? I'm not saving my bank account number to it, but I'd have no problem using it for reminders that my aunt's birthday is coming up so I need to buy a gift. If it gets popular within in the family unit, uncle will have me talk to his son and take a deep look at it anyway, try and encourage Jimmy to go back to school and look for a job and all that stuff too.
Plus, theres nothing stopping the company and indie developer from vibecoding as well.
Another way to look at this is that you're giving away all of your source code as context, and probably a lot of things you don't necessarily want to share, if you aren't using self-hosted models.
Especially with agents that slurp up files, have access to databases, etc. You're literally giving access to your computer, your network and your data to third parties and letting them run code.
During development you don't use prod data, though. So I don't see much problem here, even if I'm developing something where I would store sensitive data later.
(If there is a bug though which I would want to debug and if I were not a developer, then your concerns are more valid)
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Data privacy is a real concern, but any SaaS provider worth their salt is using Stripe or similar for payments, not rolling their own. That's not as good as not providing the info in the first place but that makes it much less likely that your CC info is going to turn up in an S3 bucket with bad permissions or something.
Yes, but at this point I'd almost rather have my CC info exposed than my personal info. There is law and consequence for fraudulent charges that protects me from loss (if not inconvenience) but there is basically no protection for playing fast and loose with my PII--in fact, it's the opposite! They sell it!
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To my mind, this is the huge bit that should not be overlooked.
So much infrastructure is there to support doing "it" in the Cloud, for all definitions of "it." If we can vibe-code bespoke one-offs to solve our problems, a lot of that Cloud interaction goes away... And that stuff is expensive and complicated.
Hypothetically, open source app stores (I'm counting apt here) address this, but then it's someone else's solution to my problem, which doesn't quite fit my problem perfectly.
This approach to software engineering could be what 3D printing is to tangible artifacts (and I mean that including the limits of 3D printing regarding tangible artifacts, but even still.)
There’s also speed - no matter what you do, a local app will simply be faster than using one from a SaaS provider
> That means my data never leaves my device
I mean, if you vibecoded it you don't actually know that, do you?
If you want to be completely watertight, you can absolutely run an on premises model. No data ever leaves your network, ever. Some pretty good models run on $5-10k hardware
Can’t do that with SaaS
Also, I’m baffled that on HN of all places, I have to actually defend the idea of rolling your own apps and protecting your data from cloud providers
Until vibecoding agents somehow develop the capability to sign up for a cloud storage API and pay for it on their own, you can probably be pretty sure about that.
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vibe code manifest.xml to disallow network access. If you're really paranoid, you can use Google search to look up the permissions names instead of relying on an LLM to do it.
No amount of what ifs and buts is going to change the fact that the tech is now mature enough to make software in hours that previously needed man-years.
And it is getting better at a pretty rapid pace.
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 what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
>> Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
How would the economics of this work universally? Jetbrains is a bit of an oddity in terms of SaaS. For the most part, it's desktop or on-premises software that was sold with a perpetual license. If you've bought a subscription and canceled, they've generated some revenue. Maintaining a subscription generates more revenue for them, but they can slow or stop development without stopping you from using the product.
SaaS is typically some server software hosted by someone else which most often doesn't have an on-premises version. They can stop making feature updates, but if they turn off the servers, the service ends. They still have costs even if you use the software less. You can argue about the profit margins, but that's not the point here. As most SaaS companies don't start with on-premises, they can't ever get their software working there for many reasons. There are a few like Atlassian and GitHub that do both, but if you look at the heritage, both are really on-premises first.
One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.
Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
Maybe we should just freeze development in lots of designated areas and declare victory (I know this isn't a practical suggestion, but still...).
Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?
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Yesterday's submission explained the choice of subscription precisely due to the need if ongoing development: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46716385
Part will be for new features, but no doubt that another big part will be for platform support over time. There's just too little backwards compatibility guarantees nowadays from the big players. We need more Microsofts in that sense!
> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).
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It is not irrational on the part of the developer -- I've definitely felt this too. The problem comes from the fact that practically everyone has subscription fatigue these days, and each of us probably has only a few pieces of software we truly care about enough to want to support them out of the goodness of our hearts.
But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
> But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail - the two most important services that control my digital life - are each $60/year, that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. The ones that do are like NextDNS where they cost $20-30 per year because the people running them aren't greedy lemmings trying to pay back VC.
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It certainly was when the options were pirate or buy, and the prices per year were much higher than $10/mo gets you.
The BIG difference is that we didn't felt entitled to use everything that is fashionable or switch apps every couple of months.
We would do a research across several magazines, local computer clubs, and the few lucky ones that had online access, some BBS or Usenet groups, then buy that one package and live with it for a couple of years, regardless of their limitations.
And so the solution is… paying Anthropic $200/mo…
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37Signals tried that with once.com . Given they're now giving those away for free and haven't said a thing about it suggests it was an abject failure. What you're paying for with SaaS is outsourcing - deployment, maintenance, security, reliability etc are someone else's problem.
The code is the easy part but there's ongoing humans needed to make it work. If Agents get to the point they can genuinely autonomously SRE & patch a service everything changes but that still seems a long way off.
Or drop the price to $20 a year instead of $20 a month and and focus on small software updated infrequently. Software as a service has a dirty secret that it was more service than software. The companies became larded with payroll and most never had great gross margins.
Pretty much. A lot of software is just good enough already, just keep security updates going and fix occasional bug people complain for too long.
But that might require just firing some people because that amount of man-hours is not needed any more or moving them to make something new and no investor likes it
I think that's where technical issues come in. For a web based SaaS app it's not worth the devs time to make multiple versions available. Even for local apps, I would say most of them have some functionality tied to an API and now you're back to running multiple versions of that server.
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
Even getting an app on the Apple App Store requires a $100/year payment. You either grow users continuously or you ask for a subscription.
I just don't understand this naive argument against subscription. If I have to pay same amount of money, I will pay in subscription than paying one time. So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue. As a consumer I will prefer the second option.
For $40 product, I will rather pay $1/month than $40 once. It keeps the incentive aligned. I think most people just assume that if the devs move away from subscription they would be fine with lower revenue and would charge less.
> So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue.
Does the software stop working after the 2 years? If so, I’d go subscription (or find another product that doesn’t explode). If it doesn’t, I’d pay the $400 assuming I want to use it for more than 2 years.
You wrongly assume that you are left with the SaaS product after paying for it for 2 years. For the one time payment, you will still have the software 2 years and more down the road.
One only compete against his own costs.
If you need $1M/y in subscriptions to build your software, you'll be outcompete by solos who needs $60k/y and don't care about the 100% churn of a one-time fee.
This is simply market optimization when the marginal cost of producing the good falls.
Biggest problem for SaaS is that people don't have enough time to be informed buyers. Like in theory you should be able to make a $0.99 annual SaaS app that provides some small service really well and sell it to a million people who need it, but that kind of sale is almost impossible. Most people are either missing out on great software they should be buying, or paying for software they don't need.
> 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):
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).
The time argument is countered in roughly the same manner as when you do home improvement.
Yiu don't pay taxes on the time spent on your own projects.
There is no alternate I've cost, as the time would usually have been spent watching television if not doing these projects.
This argument is brought up a lot against using opportunity cost for private projects, but I don't buy it
If you are dedicating a considerable amount of time on a project, there is of cause opportunity cost, since that's time
- not spend on improving health - not spend on improving skills - not spend on improving other projects
Seldom one decides between a side project and starring into the void
> the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.
It should have been, but the number of people qualified to offer proper scrutiny has been low, and those people have largely been occupied with bigger things. Or they were making those apps and had a conflict of interest.
The point is that now that vibe coding is at a level where it can identify and put together off-the-shelf components, and there are all these end users that don't really care about standardization (it's not like their SaaS products used open, interoperable standards in the first place), the ability to compete with those offerings has exploded.
I probably didn't market it enough but I specifically made an iOS game last year to be premium, $2.99, as a one time purchase to try and get around the obsession with subscription and freemium/ad-supported models but pretty much didn't get any more than a handful of sales.
At least for games I think it's much too late for the one time purchase model unless you're part of a pro studio making relatively big games.
The problem with one time purchases is that they don’t allow for rent seeking behavior - the cornerstone of any sufficiently sustainable greed model
Well, for non-standalone apps you also need some degree of ongoing support, at the very least to patch the security bug in your app or update libraries that have those.
and when whatever framework or big lib you use decide "well we're making new version, everything you made will break, have fun", that needs engineering too.
Buy once model is pretty much only for standalone, offline apps. Anything online and you have to start to worry about supporting new TLS versions or having to update certificate store (if app for some bizzare reason ignores system one)
> First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free.
Yes, but it's almost one time payment. Your own personal use case is usually narrow enough, and you don't need to support different OS/browsers. You can vibe code it and just forget the fact it's coded.
Actually it's the best use case for vibe coding (the strict meaning of this word) - when you don't plan to maintain the codebase anyway.
Almost all software “subscriptions” are a complete scam.
It's the app "stores" that encourage and push for that.
You pay less tax to them when you do subscriptions rather than one time payments, if I recall especially with Apple Store (something like 30% first year, 15% the second year of subscription).
This is why 120$ over 10 years (1$/month) is more profitable to companies than 120$ in a shot.
how do you feel about licensing where you pay once, get the software, and have access to updates for one year?
if you want future updates, you pay for another year of updates (discounted, of course, for loyalty).
or is it more compelling to just have one clean, flat, lifetime rate?
JerBrains does something similar (after paying for a year I get perpetual license for the version released that year). I’m pretty happy and feel under control. I have been paying them for years now and in case they screw up I will stop my subscription and still can download and use old version. Sure I will be missing on some bug fixes but I have used the software for a year already, I can live with those annoyances. It’s not like the new version will be all bug free either.
Why would it only be a year of updates? Just go back to how it was 10 years ago when most software was a 1 time purchase and you got updates until the next major version, then maybe you'd only get bug fixes and security updates until your OS deprecated some API the app depended on.
The industry had arguably more innovative products than exist today and that business model worked totally fine until the platform gatekeepers and VCs invented SaaS because they decided they weren't making enough money and needed to do some rent seeking.
I think the best way is you buy a software, and that version is supported "forever".
The developer then creates version n+1. The old version is kept supported, but new features go only into the new version, which you can optionally buy again.
Time/energy wise, even with agentic coding, that's probably not the most fun value proposition for smaller/solo dev teams. I now have to maintain a mental model of several versions of my software, track features, refactors, etc across all the supported versions, and make sure my work doesn't overlap too much lest I cause more bugs while keeping everything stable.
I wouldn't charge customers _less_ for that just because it's now a one-time payment.
Workingcopy app is a better model.
You can pay to unlock advanced features and keep them and any new features added in a year, after that any new features are paywalled for another unlock, and another +12 months, perpetually.
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hopefully this at least bring us to pay to own software instead of subscriptions