I built an app

I made an app. You can check it out here.

I’m not trying to sell it to you; it’s free. In fact, I’m not even trying to get you to use it; it’s not perfect and I keep finding little defects in it, so I’ll note you’re using it at your own risk / go see our full legal disclaimer. And there’s a decent chance I stop updating / tinkering with it at some point!

But I’ve been writing and thinking (more than) a little bit about the SaaSpocalypse in general and WIX in particular, so I thought “why not try to spin up something useful.” So I signed up for a free account at base44 (the company Wix bought) and gave them this prompt:

It pretty quickly returned a sleek looking page (the final result that you can access here looks very much like the original design)…. that couldn’t populate any data. To do that, I needed to enable back end functions:

It turns out (surprise surprise) that the back end functions I needed enabled required me to upgrade to a paid plan. So, in the name of learning, I bit the bullet, and ten minutes / ~$450 later I had backend functions enabled.

From there, it was pretty easy. Over the course of a week, I’d look at the app and see something I wanted added or tweaked. For example, I wanted it to track form 4s in the Russell 3000, so I just told it to go to the Russell 3000 ETF and track those tickers:

While I was building it, I decided I wanted to be able to quickly see the days biggest gainers and losers, so I did that with a simple command:

A few more back and forths, and we eventually ended up with these pages:

Now, I am not claiming this app is perfect. In fact, I’m a little suspicious that it’s still missing some insider buys. Nor am I claiming the app is groundbreaking; there are countless sites where you can quickly track insider buys or the days biggest gainers / losers.

But I made this app in about an hour of time over the course of a week. Basically once or twice a day, I’d load up the site, look at it, think “I don’t like that” or “that doesn’t look right,” tell Base44, and then get it fixed / improved until I had a site that basically works in a useful way for me. And there are two takeaways that were kind of floating around my head:

1. Remember that AI is always improving; the tools we are using today are the worst tools we will ever use. I understand that building a simple form 4 tracker is not the same as building enterprise grade CRM tools, and that quotes like “I am not claiming this app is perfect” and “I’m a little suspicious that it’s still missing some insider buys” do not exactly match with what a real business needs for mission critical software…. but if you run this forward a few years with more powerful tools, I think you could pretty easily imagine a world where companies, at minimum, can push back on price for some less critical software by saying “hey, we’re not going to pay that; cut your price or we’ll vibe code it and have an internal team manage it.”

2. It’s hard to imagine how this is a good business for Base44. Yes, they got my annual fee, and I guess if I turned that app into a real business they’d have some customer lock-in….. but I don’t see anything unique in their product. A talented developer could go vibe-code a “base45” startup that did the exact same thing as Base44 and then compete on price. Maybe I’m missing something, but for a lot of the basic internet tools that consumers use (whether that’s vibe coding apps like Base44 or building websites like Wix), it’s hard for me to see how there’s not a lot of competition / price wars coming.

As I continue to say, I’m a generalist. I’m not married to any of these conclusions; I’m happy to have a discussion or continue to learn if you’ve got other thoughts on this (or see any interesting apps you may have vibe coded).