alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
This matches what I'm seeing. The AI tooling didn't make building cheaper — it made building fun again. The gap between idea and working prototype collapsed, and that's bringing a lot of experienced builders back off the sidelines.
> 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.
Nitpicking, but I would argue that people have always been creative, it's a function of our brains. With the ubiquity of camera, videos now show that even birds and animals have levels of creativity. Biological/physical/physics/societal restrictions prevent them from taking it to the next level. Look at what ancient peoples managed to achieve without the benefit of modern tools and techniques; hard to argue people haven't always been creative.
What has changed is the ability to implement our ideas and harness our creativity - that has become significantly simpler in the age of AI.
Perhaps the discrepancy between the OP's framing of what's happening (negative impact to developers because app cost has gone to zero) and your positive perspective (hey, look at all these creative ideas we are now implementing) is a matter of perspective: you're both describing the same phenomenon, just different angles.
> You're about to see the most tech innovation our species has ever experienced.
With all due respect, we're definitely not. If any of what you said was even the faintest bit true, then we'd have something to show for it already.
Both are true. You’ll see innovation and you’ll see the cost of these very abundant simple apps go to zero. There’s no way around it. Supply and demand. Everyone can make apps, but there isn’t an obvious reason why people would be buying more apps. More apps made + same apps bought = cheaper apps.