App Subscription is now my Weekend Project

I see the sceptical comments, but no one says this "vibe-coded" projects/apps/tools will be ready for your customers. It basically scratches the itch for the given users/company/whatever. Also, it doesn't have to be fast, stable or handle 1_000_000 concurrent users. You don't have to worry about that.

Not everything has to be a SaaS, but I don't think all SaaS apps can be vibe-coded to a weekend project.

If it is solving my issues and problems, why do preaching about the merits of a proper product or paying. I'll pay for what I see value in, and vibe-code where I don't see the benefit of paying.

Maybe I miserably fail and get back to paying to product. It's all good, I take that responsibility while I start my vibe-coding session.

This is the same for me and I've not written code for years since I was a kid in school.

I vibe coded a webapp that I was paying yearly for and the version I made does everything I wish the app I paid for did as it's 100% personalised to me.

I've been thinking for awhile that this is going to be the future and I'm already starting to think of more things I will create.

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year. Would we have Claude Code if our foredevelopers hadn’t spent thousands of hours deep in thought, obsessing over every last detail?

Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.

I have no philosophical objection to vibe-coding apps for yourself, but personally, I wouldn’t be 1/10th of the engineer I am if I wasn’t constantly exposed to the work of others.

For some, this trend worries software engineers — who needs software if they can vibe code it themselves? — but I am much more optimistic. I think people will start valuing good software a lot more. Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.

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.

Which is exactly why whenever I have an idea I just tinked with ClaudeCode for an hour or so until I have exactly what I need. It takes less time than trying to compare 10 similar products, none of which have the exact specifications or features that I need.

List of projects mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716805

The prevalence of this "personal vibecoded app" spirit makes me start to wonder if an "App" is the right level of abstraction for packaging capabilities. Perhaps we need something more "granular".

> I’m still skeptical of vibecoding in general. As I mentioned above, I would not trust my vibecoding enough to make these into products.

That’s the whole point - there’s no need for it to be a product when you can do it yourself, and it’s the death knell of products like this.

The "Your" shouldn't have been stripped from the title IMHO.

I'm doing something very similar (creating my own apps for personal use), but I'm creating iOS apps primarily.

Here's what bugs me: I cannot permanently install my apps to my iPhone because of Apple's walled garden. I need to reinstall every 7 days and constantly re-confirm that I am a "Trusted" developer.

I know I can pay Apple 100 USD a year for a developer account, but I bought this phone outright 7 years ago, I own it. (Obviously, I clearly don't in this case.) /rant

This hits close to home. I've been building tools for bookkeepers and accountants as a side project, and the calculus you're describing - where a subscription becomes a weekend obligation - is exactly why I've tried to keep things genuinely useful rather than sticky.

The cynical approach would be to make the product hard to leave. But that just means you've built a trap, not something people actually want. Eventually they escape and hate you for it.

The test I use: would people recommend this to colleagues even if there's no referral incentive? If the answer is no, I'm probably building something people tolerate rather than something they value.

I get that this is tempting but it just means you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix. And disaster recovery is most certainly a manual task.

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.

Has anyone tried, on a large scale, designing the architecture of an application or writing behavioral tests (which effectively is designing the app through testing) and given the LLM the task of writing the implementation details?

Does that work better for maintainability than letting it decide on its own what the architecture should look like?

If so, what is your setup/workflow?

This is a fun article and approach.

Subscription apps often have to target a wide userbase. However, most users only need a small subset of the entire feature set, and would be better served by a tailored version. This means that vibecoded apps can get away with being much less complex (specific featureset, no login etc), while still being more useful.

I have also created tools with LLMs that are exactly tailored to what I need, and still much more polished than what I could do without LLMs. Will have to think about if there is anything else I can do this with.

> Then just yesterday, a friend of mine was telling me how he got tired of paying for Typora and decided to vibecode his own Markdown editor

But typora is actually one time purchase and one of the rare apps that is priced well with good business model.

They have probably best RTL support and I wanted like your friend to write my own focused markdown editor with RTL support using clause and made some progress but realized that the time and cost of doing this is not worth it. I just paid typora a week ago for $15.

But I understand the point and I use Claude to hack together personal tools all the time.

I made the same realization two weeks ago. Posted about it here, where I rebuilt bare bones todoist with a habit tracker, goal setting and more within a few vibe coding sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633092

I think that many existing apps with huge userbases will gradually lose users as the models become better and better. Their biggest advantage is that people don't like change, and thus having to e.g. export data from some tools etc. seems to be a hassle not worth $5 a month. But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.

On the other hand, new products will have a much harder time to gather a big userbase. Whenever I'll see a launch of a SaaS asking for $$$, the first question I'll ask myself will be how long it will take LLM to recreate it. And for most cases, I imagine that the time it will take to get 80% of what they have is a few vibe coding sessions (as most newcomers will probably have used LLM themselves to code it up).

I did this recently at the company I work at. Someone suggested GitBook, I 'Vibe coded' an internal docs website in under and hour. Does what we need, looks good. Unless the app has a large community/network and is just a SaaS with some offering, it'll be very easy to replace it.

It’s easy to overlook what I think is the real value of these “home-built” tools.

We can now produce products and apps that are tailored to our own preferred ways of working.

Regardless of the cost of generating them (which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription) or the effort involved (sometimes less than an hour of “vibe coding”), we’ve reached a point where the resulting product can be significantly more valuable than the existing product, service, or subscription it replaces.

Loved the article, thanks for sharing. I’m curious if you’d share your setup. I haven’t made any macOS apps before, primarily because I never wanted to really learn XCode and obj-c. I like swift but still prefer simpler editors like Zed/VSC vs. What XCode offers.. so when you’re building these are you doing it in XCode or in another tool like Claude Code/codex/gemini CLI?

cheers

I should vibecode my own Onshape.

The SaaS business model took things too far anyway. Everything is a subscription and it gets tiring quickly. I am glad that LLMs can replace crappy SaaS with crappy code now.

I replaced a whole bunch of these with one shot prompts for shits and giggles.

And one day your day job will be someone else weekend project

Some apps just do not make any sense for monetization and are now raced to zero. If it's not already open sourced then someone will vibe-code an implementation if none exist.

Vibe-coding accelerates the destruction of basic (closed-source) apps charging a subscription for features that offer little to no value whatsoever.

I think there's still an underestimated burden to vibe-coding an app for a non-software engineer. I'm not recommending my parents vibe-code apps to solve problems, so I think the market is smaller.

But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.

Thats not cheaper than paying a subscription. In fact this is at least 3x-10x more expensive.

And this is comparing to being subscribed many years in a row. With SaaS you can unsub and sub only when you need it again.

With your side project - a weekend of your life is invested and you will never get it back.

This is the worst use of your time if you measure it in $. If you make it for fun - sure. In all other terms it is a complete loss.