AI is going to kill app subscriptions

2026-02-1515:21148240nichehunt.app

Curated niche app opportunities from Reddit, scored by difficulty and demand.

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The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.

We're already seeing this play out in the numbers. Apple's App Store got 557K new submissions in 2025, up 24% from 2024 (source: Appfigures). That's not because people suddenly got more creative. It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude.

What happens to pricing

For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions, but the price will drop to barely above cost. Same logic applies: easy to copy means no pricing power.

Apple isn't fighting this

I thought Apple to tighten App Store review to slow down the flood of apps. Instead they put Claude in Xcode. They're not just okay with AI-generated apps—they're actively supporting it.

The revenue numbers back this up. App Store grew 11% in 2025, Google Play 5%. There's still tons of unmet demand, especially for niche use cases that were never worth building before. Lower development costs mean these niches finally get served.

Developer perspective

This sucks for developers trying to make a living from apps. The competitive pressure is going to be brutal. But for users? It's great. People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?"

That might actually become reality now.

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By camdenreslink 2026-02-1515:348 reply

Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?

By onion2k 2026-02-1515:416 reply

That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really been that difficult.

Having the ideas necessary to know what to write is where practically all the value lies (caveat: there is value in doing the same as someone else but better, or cheaper.) AI can help with that, but only in so much as telling you the basics or filling in the blanks if you're really stuck. It can't tell you the 'clever bit' because that is by definition new and interesting and doesn't appear in the training data.

What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.

By ethbr1 2026-02-1515:58

> What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.

Bang on, and Jira is the perfect example! Because Jira isn't a bag of features: Jira is a list of features and the way they fit together (well or poorly, depending on your opinion).

That's the second-order product design that it's going to take next-gen coding AI workflows to automate. Mostly because that bit comes from user discovery, political arguments, sales prioritization, product vision, etc. It's a horrendous "art" of multi-variable zero-sum optimization.

When products get it right (early Slack) then it's invisible because "of course they made it do the thing I want to do."

When products get it wrong (MS Teams, Adobe Acrobat, Jira, HR platforms) then it's obvious features weren't composed well.

Expect there's more than one {user discovery} -> {product specification} AI startup out there, working on it in a hierarchical fashion with current AI now.

By yellowapple 2026-02-1515:462 reply

On top of that, it's one thing to write the code, whereas it's another to actually run that code with maximal reliability and minimal downtime. I'm sure LLMs can churn out Terraform all day long, but can they troubleshoot when something goes wrong (as is often the case)?

By oceansky 2026-02-1515:54

Sounds like a fun experiment, let AI completely control an infrastructure, from application layer to load balancing and databases.

I bet it would burn a lot of money very fast and not just on tokens.

By ej88 2026-02-1516:012 reply

I would posit another large factor is "owning" the software comes with the long tail of edge cases, bugs, support, on-call, regulations, etc... that an established SaaS has learned and iterated on for many years with many customers.

For the vast majority of companies they would (and should) rather let the SaaS figure that out and focus on their actual company

By esafak 2026-02-1517:09

It seems people are forgetting that companies should develop their differentiators and pay for the rest.

By plagiarist 2026-02-163:26

AI can allegedly do all of those. Except perhaps it cannot be trusted with regulations, since that one has consequences for doing poorly.

By exe34 2026-02-1516:05

AI companies already know what they need. they're paying for it. it would make a great case study for them to make a list of all external software they're using, list the features they use (or make the ai watch them for a week), and then prompt the AI to rewrite those in-house.

By joquarky 2026-02-1521:18

They just added task management in CC, which is a start in that direction.

By Keyframe 2026-02-1516:35

This is what people don't get, what's coming up and it'll hit them like a ton of bricks. Software development, after toy examples, was a scale limiting factor for the better part of software development if you had domain expertise. Now, we hear constantly that it doesn't matter since "muh experience" and architecture, choices, tradeoffs etc for which you need seniority to operate LLM efficiently (or at all). This is true, of course. What people don't seem to get that that's what's coming next. Your experience won't mean crap anymore and then the ride starts full blast.

By MontyCarloHall 2026-02-1515:496 reply

Addendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software?

People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It would be both a huge cash cow and the best possible advertising that AI-facilitated software development is truly the real deal 10x force multiplier they claim.

If someone invents a special shovel that can magically identify ore deposits 100% of the time, they aren't going to sell it with the rest of the shovelmongers. They're going to keep it to themselves and actually mine gold.

By tayo42 2026-02-1516:42

Generating code isn't the bottleneck for selling software.

Those apps aren't that bad, it's just internet people complaining about things like react.

Imo "higher quality" isn't a way to sell software

By hxugufjfjf 2026-02-1516:023 reply

Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.

By dangus 2026-02-164:021 reply

But Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does.

If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?

Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?

What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?

Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?

Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.

By adithyassekhar 2026-02-1613:531 reply

Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. It's not comparable to iOS at all.

By dangus 2026-02-1621:071 reply

Okay, I agree with your premise, but can you point to some tangible acceleration in innovation.

Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?

By adithyassekhar 2026-02-172:591 reply

Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.

By dangus 2026-02-1714:571 reply

Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.

My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.

In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.

To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.

Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.

Essentially, this experience will be the most common one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1r6olcv/an...

By adithyassekhar 2026-02-1715:11

This I do agree with. All I've seen is reducing headcounts and forcing people to take up other roles as well.

By camdenreslink 2026-02-1516:591 reply

But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it.

They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.

It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!

By hattmall 2026-02-1721:30

They care about money, they are making tons of investor money doing what they are doing, there's no incentive to pivot if it would just turn investor money into consumer money.

By chickenimprint 2026-02-161:221 reply

Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business".

Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?

By signatoremo 2026-02-162:553 reply

Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?

By rkuodys 2026-02-166:581 reply

Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative. With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI

By skydhash 2026-02-1612:43

They could always help with some OSS software’s list of bugs and issues.

By lpnam0201 2026-02-1616:26

Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ? To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?

By mdavid626 2026-02-167:41

Then why are they letting their models write browsers and compilers?

By Keyframe 2026-02-1516:37

Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat?

My guess is two-fold. One, they are specialized in AI. Two, building another anthropic is a big moat and they like to keep it big vs what you could build with it.

By Aerroon 2026-02-1615:31

Why aren't we in the year of the Linux desktop? It's free and arguably close enough, better, or as good as Windows.

I think in the modern world people would absolutely sell the special shovel, because even if you have a better product that doesn't mean people are going to be using it. You need to have a much better product for a long time for that to happen. And being much better than the competition is hard.

By ethbr1 2026-02-1516:012 reply

Anthropic appears to have realized before OpenAI that code gen was an important enough market to specialize in.

For now though, building smarter models / general integration tooling is a better us of model companies' capital.

Once/if performance gains plateau, expect you'll see them pivot right quick to in-house software factories for easily cloneable, large TAM product spaces, then spin off those products if they're successful.

By MontyCarloHall 2026-02-1516:14

100% agreed. When/if that pivot happens will be the sign that gen-AI is truly disrupting the software market in a profound way. "You're using the model wrong/you're not using the latest model" is an oft-repeated argument against AI skeptics. Nobody knows how to use the latest models better than their developers.

By pydry 2026-02-1523:22

For the time being though, theyre going to build their in house software with electron because building native apps is hard.

By plagiarist 2026-02-1515:59

They're still training up using all of our extensive feedback to improve software architecture. Maybe later this year.

By bsder 2026-02-162:12

Because SaaS at the corporate level is about liability transfer first and any value or functionality is a distant second.

By vntok 2026-02-1515:43

How is that a counterpoint? Do these companies currently use as many SaaS as other companies? More importantly, will they do so in the future?

By bieganski 2026-02-1515:39

their costs are bound to compute anyway, they don't mind huge compensations also - it's not much of a cost saving to re-build, even cheaply, inhouse Slack or whatever?

By OtomotO 2026-02-1515:38

Bingo!

By deterministic 2026-02-1523:571 reply

... and why are they still loosing billions of $? Surely their AI can help them (say) generate good biz models? :-)

By robocat 2026-02-162:21

Correction: the investors lose billions (and perhaps their customers and/or suppliers lose billions too).

The companies don't lose anything. The employees and executives are not losing anything.

Welcome to business.

By dist-epoch 2026-02-1515:482 reply

Opportunity cost.

Cloning Slack and wasting ultra-expensive engineers on that might be more expensive, and it's not your core mission.

By anonymous908213 2026-02-1515:561 reply

Why do you have to waste ultra-expensive engineers on it? You have agents. And verifying your product works as it is claimed should absolutely be part of your mission. How can you possibly claim that your models are revolutionising software development if you haven't even used them to revolutionise your own software development in-house? Not only that, it would produce a huge marketing coup that would immediately lead to a flood of enterprise spending if you could demonstrate that your agents actually do what you constantly claim them to do.

PS. If you're claiming that coding an application is ultra-expensive, you are already entering the argument on the side of the comment you're arguing against, which is making a counterpoint to the article, which claims in the first sentence:

> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.

By dist-epoch 2026-02-1520:062 reply

They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.

Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.

By anonymous908213 2026-02-1520:181 reply

Billions of dollars of revenue on trillions of dollars of investment is not a revolutionary feat. I promise you I could turn trillions into billions too.

Neither of those software are primarily responsible for the revenue, either. The actual models underlying them are, not the trivial CLI chat interface (which, despite being trivial software, still manages to be full of bugs that go unfixed for months). I also don't even think it's true that Codex is primarily agent-written. OpenAI specifically cited using Electron in their recent Codex desktop application for "agent orchestration" to save human developer time on porting it across platforms, which does not sound like a successful exercise in eating their dog food.

By wanderlust123 2026-02-1612:38

If you could turns trillions into billions, why haven’t you yet?

By tonyedgecombe 2026-02-167:041 reply

>Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.

So they say.

By J_Shelby_J 2026-02-168:44

Yeah this got a chuckle from me.

By Ekaros 2026-02-1521:20

If you have tools that allow superior efficiency shouldn't you be hiring every possible just expensive engineer you can get your hands on and put them to produce massive amounts of products to out compete everyone else in the world.

Shouldn't they be in place to replace absolutely every other tech company? That is tens of trillions of valuation in short few years.

By redhale 2026-02-1612:511 reply

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of them, imo.

Good riddance to this hellscape of a market. We now face the dawning of a new slopocalypse era, and its whole new set of problems.

By ToucanLoucan 2026-02-1614:35

It's just the same community of people who believe they are unable/it is beneath them to acquire skills because of some impending super-automation that will let them do everything great that they have envisioned but have previously been stifled by the aforementioned lack of skills moving from one hype-bubble to the next.

By markbao 2026-02-1516:245 reply

Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc…

The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisions instead of paying $5 a month for someone else to do that work. Comparative advantage doesn’t just apply to the cost of writing code, but also the effort of making product decisions.

Edit: I don’t mean that a grocery app should cost $5/month, the grocery app was a toy example and the $5/month refers to an example of a separate app you’d pay for with much more value.

By rubb3rDucc 2026-02-1519:161 reply

This thread hits very close to home for me. I'm engineering the frontend for a grocery list app as a capstone project right now and I'm handling a lot of the product and feature decisions, and the discussion about "just prompt Claude to build it" versus the reality of those decisions is something my team deals with constantly.

The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution is awesome, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's now possible. But what I've found is that even with AI assistance, there are so many interconnected decisions that make this more than a one-shot prompt project.

I pushed for us to build a mobile app specifically to take advantage of portability (use it at home for planning, at the store for shopping) and the camera (image recognition with OpenAI and scanning barcodes with expo-camera). That sounds simple, but it cascades into hundreds of UX decisions about offline-first architecture, gesture patterns, camera permissions, and more.

The units and quantities problem mentioned in this thread is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to figure out a data model that mirrors how people naturally think about groceries: how they categorize items, how they plan meals versus staples versus impulse buys, how they track what's running low. Modeling those mental models is genuinely hard.

What helps is that I worked as an ecommerce shopper at Whole Foods, and I learned that stores are meticulously organized with numbered bays and predetermined routes optimized for efficiency. Translating that knowledge into a system that can intelligently sort a shopping list based on store layout (which varies by location!) and typical shopping patterns is genuinely complex.

One of my teammates put it well: this is a simple idea, but it requires a level of care, expertise, and experience to get it right. AI's incredibly helpful for implementing solutions once we've made these decisions, but the decisions themselves require domain knowledge, user research, and taste. That's the part that's hard to automate, and it's what makes this a real engineering project rather than a weekend Claude experiment.

By SoftTalker 2026-02-1516:252 reply

Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!

By eddythompson80 2026-02-1516:511 reply

I spent years trying to find the PERFECT pantry tracking, auto shopping list generating, auto "what can I make tonight with what I have", auto meal preping app. The idea seemed so simple in mind back then. Let me input everything I have, then as I pull ingredients out of the fridge I just "decrease eggs by 3, decrease butter by 1tbsp, decrease bacon by 2 slices" then over time, it will just build my shopping list for me etc. I even built a requirement list and spent a year implementing my own thing.

Given the number of apps put there, from dozens of OSS hobbyist apps to industrial resturant inventory management ones, I wan't alone in thinking this is a solved problem and someone should just have the perfect interface for it. Between auto-unit converting apps, natural language processing apps, @cooklang, a million ideas about tracking pantries and ingredients and their categories, frequency of use charts, etc..

Then one time I went on a trip with a friend to his home town where we stayed at his parents house. His 78 year old mother had a 2 notepads attached to the fridge with a pencil on a string. As she worked in the kitchen, between washing hands she would just jot down random notes, cross others, doddles some on one notepad, and the other she would just add meal plans as she went along. Then when we were going to market she just ripped the page off.

Sounds so fucking simple and easy and I felt so stupid for the amount of effort I put trying to figure out the right app, the right device to mount on my fridge, how to connect power to it. How to make it not always on to blind me at night, but also so I don't have to keep fiddling with it to unlock it. how to use it with wet fingers, how to keep translating units and "catch up" when I miss updating it for a couple of meals, how to hide ingredients I don't care about and highlight ones I do, how to rearrange the interface. It seriously gave me a pause at how dumb I was that the solution is much much simpler and I pigeon holed my thinking on a tech solution for some reason.

Can't sell people notepads though. There is no margin or lock-in in that stuff.

By Feuilles_Mortes 2026-02-1621:53

I do hear what you're saying, and I've wrestled with "not everything should / can be an app". That being said, I'm still trying to solve food (for myself) with computers, haha.

Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.

It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.

By esafak 2026-02-1516:51

That's just a contrived example. Every application involves a million subjective decisions; from the architecture, algorithms, to the UI/UX.

By noelsusman 2026-02-1516:335 reply

A grocery list app is the perfect example of the kind of thing that AI will make obsolete. Why would I pay $5/month for a list app when I can pay Claude $0.30 one time to make it for me?

I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It's the kind of thing that would be incredibly difficult to scale but works just fine when you only have one user. No SaaS grocery app can hope to compete with me being able to tailor my own shopping list app to my exact preferences.

By pan69 2026-02-1518:31

> reverse engineer my grocery store's API

Your grocery store has a free API you can use? Even if that is the case, that will then soon change. If app building becomes "free" then the cost will shift over to the data access.

By notahacker 2026-02-1516:44

Who pays $5 per month for grocery store apps anyway? The usual revenue model is the app is free and you pay for the groceries...

By bavarianbob 2026-02-1517:48

I think an engineer might, but my mother and wife will certainly pick the $5/mo option every time.

By markbao 2026-02-1516:40

That is exactly the type of awesome app that can now be built. I edited my comment to clarify that the grocery app and $5/month app are separate examples, but I think your example shows that someone with coding knowledge can build something extremely useful for n=1 users which I fully support.

I just don’t think most people will end up doing that just like how most people don’t 3D print their own desk drawer organizers even when Gridfinity does all the work for you. Automation doesn’t fully replace the volition to build a thing and make tricky decisions that are familiar to us software engineers but not others.

By fatfox 2026-02-1519:52

Exactly. I think only software developers believe AI is going to kill app subscriptions, because they're the ones who can actually wrangle the output into something maintainable.

For anyone without dev or product experience, getting beyond a basic feature set and keeping it running reliably (or roll it out to > 1 user) is still a massive challenge.

By xnx 2026-02-1516:251 reply

Or is the claim that someone will write the app and sell it for $5 one time or give it away free?

By markbao 2026-02-1516:30

Yes, that’s a possibility! And for app types that have a limited ceiling of how much value they can provide, that will definitely be a thing as an AI app can saturate all of that value.

But for apps that have a lot of ceiling, people will still gravitate to apps that have had more care and attention than someone vibe coding it once and throwing it on the store, just like how people choose those well-built and maintained apps today over using their built-in Reminders app.