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    Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

    (martinalderson.com)
    413 points martinald | 15 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.601s | source | bottom
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    nine_k ◴[08 Dec 25 20:15 UTC] No.46197061[source]▶
    Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players.

    From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.

    This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

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    1. thot_experiment ◴[08 Dec 25 20:24 UTC] No.46197162[source]▶
    To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.
    replies(2): >>46198766 #>>46203193 #
    2. layer8 ◴[08 Dec 25 22:52 UTC] No.46198766[source]▶
    We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.
    replies(9): >>46199159 #>>46199258 #>>46199485 #>>46200281 #>>46200282 #>>46200414 #>>46200680 #>>46204074 #>>46204862 #
    3. AnimalMuppet ◴[08 Dec 25 23:30 UTC] No.46199159[source]▶
    Also also, we should reach the point where you have decent quality source code for a local application, and you can tell GPT "SaaS this", and it works.

    I'm not seeing that either.

    4. raw_anon_1111 ◴[08 Dec 25 23:41 UTC] No.46199258[source]▶
    And why would this happen? Local to what every SaaS product I use is available on my Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad and the web. Some are web only and some are web and apps.

    Who is going to maintain the local software? Who is going to maintain the servers for self hosted or the client software?

    5. bsder ◴[09 Dec 25 00:02 UTC] No.46199485[source]▶
    Why should you see a flurry of software?

    What LLMs demonstrate is that the problem is dealing with people, not software. Look at the number of open source maintainers who are hanging it up.

    Unless you have a path to monetization, writing software for anybody but yourself is a fool's errand.

    6. vachina ◴[09 Dec 25 01:37 UTC] No.46200281[source]▶
    > Local-first

    > Not seeing any

    Working exactly as intended?

    replies(1): >>46201009 #
    7. threecheese ◴[09 Dec 25 01:37 UTC] No.46200282[source]▶
    You might not be looking hard enough. There are a few sources you could look at, one is the GitHub Awesome YouTube channel. I am seeing a lot of several-hundred-stars open source projects with unreasonably large codebases starting to gain traction. This is the frontier of adoption, and my guess is this will start cascading outward.
    8. thot_experiment ◴[09 Dec 25 01:57 UTC] No.46200414[source]▶
    Why? I don't want to bother making all the software that the AI wrote for me work on someone else's machine. The difference between software that solves my problem and that solves a problem many people have is also often like an order of magnitude of effort.
    9. ◴[09 Dec 25 02:45 UTC] No.46200680[source]▶
    10. wild_egg ◴[09 Dec 25 03:40 UTC] No.46201009{3}[source]▶
    This. I have a massive amount of custom software running locally to solve all sorts of problems for me now.

    But it's for me and tailor made to solve my precise use cases. Publishing it would just add headaches and endless feature requests and bug reports for zero benefit to me.

    11. sofixa ◴[09 Dec 25 09:57 UTC] No.46203193[source]▶
    With a SaaS, you have one platform that you fully control. Broken dependency? Need to update/rollback? It's all in your hands.

    Local software has to target multiple OSes, multiple versions of those OSes, and then a million different combinations of environments that you as a developer have no control over. Windows update whatever broke your app, but the next one fixed it? Good luck getting your user base to update instead of being pissed at you

    replies(1): >>46204123 #
    12. theshrike79 ◴[09 Dec 25 12:13 UTC] No.46204074[source]▶
    I've built so many of these just for myself over the last year or two. A good two dozen from a cursory count on my Github.

    They all work decently enough for my personal use and are 80-100% Vibe coded but about 0% vibe designed.

    13. theshrike79 ◴[09 Dec 25 12:18 UTC] No.46204123[source]▶
    A single Go binary can cross-compile to multiple OS-versions with a simple Github Action.

    And if it's a free open source application, why would I care if someone can't run it on their specific brand of OS? I'm open to PRs.

    If the "user base" wants to update, they can come to the github page and download the latest binary. I'm not building an autoupdater for a free application.

    replies(1): >>46204415 #
    14. sofixa ◴[09 Dec 25 12:52 UTC] No.46204415{3}[source]▶
    But you're talking about a free open source application without guarantees, that's not comparable to a SaaS vs self-hosted "paid" software in model.

    And even for the cases where you it is, even with a modern language like Go that makes it easy, you still have tons of OS specific complexity. Service definitions, filesystem operations, signal handling, autoupdates if you want them, etc etc.

    15. weird-eye-issue ◴[09 Dec 25 13:45 UTC] No.46204862[source]▶
    I think you underestimate just how hard visibility is. If something is free or super low cost than they won't have any marketing budget for you to hear about it in the first place because it would be unprofitable...

    One thing I've come to realize is that if something is cheap enough then people won't even want to promote it because if they get a commission on it then it won't be worth their time. So in some cases they will be better off recommending a much higher price competitor. Just go Google around for some type of software (something competitive and commercial like CRMs) and you'll notice why for commercial projects nobody is recommending free or really cheap solutions because it's not in anybody's best interest