Yeah. Part of why this is possible is simply that there are tons of subscription apps out there that were never really justified in requiring a recurring payment and are actually fairly trivial.

It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that.

I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.

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TheGRS 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Was reminiscing about the early iOS App Store days when many apps were free and often hobby projects. Some hooked up google ads to make a nice easy profit if they stumbled on a particularly good early app idea. I don't really find apps like that anymore, or at least they don't really get shared the same way. Maybe this is a return to that in a sense.

I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.

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mr_mitm 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What I fear is a pollution of the open source space with tons of tailored apps that have a lot of overlap, but none of them get meaningful contributions because the maintainer will most likely respond with wontfix to almost everything (if they respond at all).

	▲	theshrike79 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I build in the open, but what I build is just for me. If someone wants to fork it and modify it, they can go ahead - pretty much all of my stuff is MIT licensed by default. But I'm not going to start adding features to my bespoke utility to fix someone else's problem.
	▲	pixl97 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Shrug, it's hard to have an open app where everyone wants to add/change something and not have it turn into a Turing machine that attempts to do everything. Sometimes you just want an app does X and Y, but not A, B and Z.