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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: 0.001s | 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. 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