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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.195s | source
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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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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.
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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.
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1. 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.