←back to thread

Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(28): >>46197121 #>>46197162 #>>46197191 #>>46197790 #>>46198132 #>>46198182 #>>46198282 #>>46198425 #>>46198498 #>>46198608 #>>46198655 #>>46198747 #>>46198991 #>>46199214 #>>46199310 #>>46199646 #>>46199706 #>>46201118 #>>46201177 #>>46202111 #>>46202477 #>>46202670 #>>46203360 #>>46204030 #>>46204863 #>>46204917 #>>46207989 #>>46214063 #
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 #
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 #
1. 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.