alt Hacker NewsAI is going to kill app subscriptions
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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
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.
Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc…
The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisions instead of paying $5 a month for someone else to do that work. Comparative advantage doesn’t just apply to the cost of writing code, but also the effort of making product decisions.
Edit: I don’t mean that a grocery app should cost $5/month, the grocery app was a toy example and the $5/month refers to an example of a separate app you’d pay for with much more value.
AI won’t kill subscriptions but it will drive prices down. Viable competitors will emerge and incumbency will become a less viable long term play.
Non-experts will build progressively more interesting things as model capability goes up - but experts will always be able to produce yet more complex things than that.
So user expectations will keep rising.
The cost of software development will go down for software at and below some level of complexity, but up for anything above that level. The level where that tips will keep changing, just as it always has. To understand this, consider that tipping point across today’s and yesterday’s “hand-typed software”: it has been moving the whole time, thanks to frameworks and libraries and languages improving.
The world of software will remain much as it is today - a mix of free and non-free stuff. But on average and in the large it’ll be of way higher quality, and bring corresponding improvements in your quality of life.
> 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.
That would be awesome. Subscriptions made web development suck. It used to be so fun.
I think that even if everything can be copied, some platforms are still hard to copy, and some have greater barriers that are legal compliance, and others needs to be able to scale to be viable. Even if apps can be copied, the underlying architectural decisions are usually not so visible as the interface, and the developer should have a good knowledge of building architectures to add value to the existing apps.
My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.
Subscription is not about app ownership, but mostly running the infra. AI is going to make basically everything even more expensive and subscription based.
Your point is based on wrong assumptions.
I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months?
[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
I don't agree with the premise that we pay a subscription because there is no better and cheaper alternative. We pay Slack subscriptions but we could get IRC for free. We pay Google Drive subscription but we could get rsync for free.
The reason we pay a subscription is because the company that built the software knows our business, knows how to get in touch with the decision maker, and knows how to market their product as something desirable. The actual software has little influence in that decision.
On the contrary, I think the price of SaaS subscriptions will go up as a result of AI. Because the only customers who will switch to a cheaper (or home made) alternative are the ones for whom the software is a commodity. These customers used to form the long tail of subscriptions, usually on the lower tier. When the entry pricer disappears, and the software editor has to generate a high return for their investors, the only way to keep profitability is to increase the price for the other tiers.
I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.”
App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?
I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use. If your software doesn't provide a service, like sync, storage, availability, if it is just local, it'll be a tough market.
This also got me thinking about open source might be dying. For this tool, there is no reason for me to open source it, anyone can create the same thing in minutes. I didn't add anything, the only maybe interesting part would be to share the prompt, but then someone else can create their own prompt to have their tool do what they want.
Software world is really getting weird.
What if "Stallman was right" and this means users will actually pay people to make software for them, even if it's "open source"? (TFA doesn't mention open source but it might as well be if cloning is cheap)
Probably wouldn't be a bad thing.
> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app.
For the types of apps that AI can clone on its own, this has always been true. It's the eternal bookstore example, recipe collection, or my-dvd-collection app. The type of apps that Basic and Visual Basic were designed for.
If there was value in selling subscriptions to an app like this, it was probably coincidental.
From a developer's perspective, it seems like we're at a point where we're increasingly concerned about how to make a living and how to pursue a career.
like how Roombas killed the housekeeping industry ?
Making the app is the easy part. The hard part is getting users. Also I have doubts if AI can make a sufficiently complex app.
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 app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude."
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. Many of us are burnt out OG programmers who have rediscovered our love for programming. Now we can create without the drudgery.
You're about to see the most tech innovation our species has ever experienced. Hold on to your seat.
Building a UI is fairly simple, all things considered. Building a full-scale system? Much harder. Deploying it so it can be multi-user? Maintaining it? These are things that separate toys from products.
This is absolute nonsense. The app stores are already saturated with tons of free apps that no one uses. Sure the numbers are up—10x of infinity is still infinity—and the reason Apple doesn't care is because this is just the natural end game of their strategy to commoditize their complement.
When it comes to software subscriptions, the bar is just that much higher. Not only do you have to pass the threshold for someone to even adopt another app/website/brand, but now you have to provide enough utility to pay for it. Claude spitting out code for a good-enough clone of an app doesn't come anywhere near the threshold. An agent that can write the code, buy a domain, provision and maintain the database, and submit the app to the app store gets closer, but now it's not looking so cheap anymore, moreso in terms of your time commitment as defacto product manager than actual tokens and hosting costs.
The actual disruption of SaaS apps will come from agents that are capable of solving problems autonomously in a different way such that you don't even need the SaaS. I'm sure we'll get there in time, but not without a lot of data integrity and security issues, and rogue agent fuckups along the way.
By using an external service, people outsource problems. Using agentic coding to „clone“ a service by naively specifying the features (not the implementation) will insource the problem. If the problem is static, separated, well understood and used internally only, it may be okay to do so. In other circumstances I highly doubt it. SaaS markt will come back stronger once people suffered enough pain in doing „the app myself“.
I daresay we're going to see a burgeoning situations where the software (code) is open-sourced under a permissive or copyleft license, while the associated data, content, or assets (e.g., datasets, models, or databases) are handled under separate, often more restrictive licenses.
I wrote an article about this a few days ago that has been gaining a lot of traction: https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html
Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore
Never did tbh. These apps should be one time purchases at best.
The trick with this wave of fast apps will be getting others to use the things that are built. Sure you can build something for yourself quickly enough, but you'll likely need the rest of your team onboard, which comes with a slew of other problems and complexities.
After the dot.com, there was the O-pocalypse that terrified me as a recent grad.
- Open source - Outsourcing - Offshoring
It was driving the labour cost of an engineer to zero I felt as a young man.
Then time passed, and I learnt that engineers aren't paid to code. Engineers are paid to solve problems for a business.
If you recall, the dot.com bust and 9/11 crashed finances for a few years. When the money printing gun went whir because "Deficits don't matter" Washington, then engineers were in demand again.
Right now we are in a weird situation where money is being printed and it is also tight. Most of it is going to the hardware and infrastructure layer, like the fiber optic bubble in the dot.com. Software will have its time in the sun again.
No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that
Surely unless you are building your own models, and running them locally, you still have to pay OpenAi/Anthropic/Google etc for the API usage?
And even if you do build your own models, unless they run locally on the device, you still need to pay for hosting?
Oh, thank god, it had been a week since we last saw a post about AI killing something. It’s subscriptions this time, all users will be vibe coding apps on their spare time.
The article's right that build costs are collapsing, but that was rarely the hard part. The cost of a real product is architecture decisions, security, data modeling, ops — stuff that doesn't disappear because Claude wrote your CRUD layer.
What I think actually changes is the packaging. Per-seat subscriptions assumed humans in dashboards. That's the part on borrowed time. The workflow logic underneath still has value — it just gets consumed differently as agents start doing the clicking.
A lot of these apps already have free versions and businesses still stick with the paid ones. There's value in someone else taking responsibility.
I mean a 10 / month pdf editor sounds like an outrageously bad deal… that’s 120 a year so good riddance
But if people want to make more good creative games and the store helps me find them I have plenty more money to shovel at them
> 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.
"AI", the new Napster.
Another reason that push to kill subscription is that many users just want software that actually works forever—no subscriptions, no ads. That’s why so many of us prefer one-time purchases. I’m definitely in that camp. I stick to local-first apps because I know they won't get worse over time.
I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions.
My theory as an old guy is that the standards will just go up.
There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.
We’ve seen this before. A good example would be when the mobile app stores launched and you could get traction with just about anything. And then you couldn’t.
I think the options are:
1. Local models or token cost plummets
2. Subscriptions more prevalent, given token costs
3. A single subscription (tokens) to rule them all
4. Apps with use-based pricing
> 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
Yes and no.
I have created 15 small apps that solves all kinds of things for me. However, at the department I work full of non-technical people, most of them don’t even know lovable exists.
And for the one that does know lovable exists, they tend to build stuff with some botched backend and you’ll get to scaling issues, security issues and who knows what else
Good luck making your own clone of "simple" file sharing and synchronization app like Google Drive!
"I copied an icon from desktop to a thumb drive to copy the whole program" mindset.
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.
Only unique data will be worth something.
One subscription to rule them all.
Subscriptions arnt going away. Software will just be like cable and now streaming.
People will still pay for convenience or functionality.
If there is a feature that cannot be done on-device, and that on-Internet feature can be effectively moated and duplication-resisted, then if it’s a feature that people think they need they will absolutely open their wallets to pay for.
The trick is finding that feature or attribute that cannot be done on-device, and then moating it against AI duplication. Do that, make it appear indispensable in the minds of people, and they will absolutely pay for it.
> People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?" That might actually become reality now.
I'm seriously wondering if this blog is just some rage bait or if that guy is really that dumb? I can't tell anymore.
> 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
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 provider bills and such to host my backend.
i do pay for some premium apps that run entirely on device, like Halide Camera. But there again, is my $20/mo tokens enough to clone a high quality image processing app, to such a degree i will trust it to capture precious memories effectively? ehh.
This is a terrible take. Competition in the app space is competition for distribution/attention. Subscriptions are just how apps convert that attention to dollars. Consumers almost never price shop apps.
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?