8 Comments
User's avatar
Travis's avatar

Damn homie we got to get you on a cheaper plan! I do stuff like this with Replit for ~$17 a month.

This is also a vastly different use case than a scaled platform. Replacing Trello or Finviz is easy enough, but as you grow feature set and requirements, the "we'll just vibe code this" gets MUCH harder and much more expensive. We're going to see a bifurcation within SaaS between those that actually get disrupted and some software companies that actually benefit from feature velocity & AI enhancements. AlphaSense is a good example of the latter where I think the business gets more & more valuable via AI.

Questionable Dignity's avatar

What are your thoughts on the other aspect of this - AI taking jobs. Like Block for example, in the short term shares are up 25%, but in the longer term, how many other companies will be incentivized to cut jobs and will we have structural unemployment? I’m finding it hard to not care about macro when I see this as a huge tail risk but very curious to hear your thoughts!

Beeli Capital's avatar

Thanks for posting and actually building something! I tried to access the website / app but I got some insider intel login page. Is it deliberately behind a login?

I think one of the big questions is the ability to troubleshoot all the things that go wrong, or see if base44 can troubleshoot problems without this becoming an hour+ time sink for you each week. A lot of projects end up being difficult to maintain and create a lot of overhead.

Andrew Walker's avatar

not deliberate on my end; think that's jsut the website!

for a proejct this simple, once you troubleshoot a problem it's solved.... but i coudl definitely imagine the frustrations with something more complex / bigger

Matt Wilbert's avatar

I think this is basically a correct take, at least at the moment. Software providers are going to face greater competition. Also, I think it's going to be harder to charge for add-on capabilities; you will either have AI do that added-on thing, or have AI write you something that does it. Doesn't mean the software companies disappear, just that a lot of them will probably have constant margin/pricing pressure. Somewhat offset by lower software development costs, but in a very low marginal cost business, my assumption is that lower margins are more important than the reduced costs.

And this is before you start having problems with the seat-based subscription models in general, because of a decreasing need for seats.

Oliver Sung's avatar

Feels like AI compresses the middle class of software.

anon's avatar

is 'backend' a phrase for unauthorized re-packaging per API license?

Capital Structure's avatar

Perplexity Computer would be better at this because it excels in research oriented tasks. At $200/month (I assume you paid for a year with the ~$400) you can see why it can be profitable.