What does software look like when it costs nearly nothing?

There have been a lot of takes on this recently, not to mention a lot of businesses like Replit and Lovable making big bets on the outcome. Personally, I think its weird that a lot of these bets just seem to be "regular software but cheap". Indeed, go ask an agent from one of these CO's to build you an app and it will make something that looks like normal software in 2024 — there's a full stack app with a UI, backend and a data layer, probably postgres. There's some CRUD forms and an integration or two. There's a CSS file that looks strikingly similar to all of the other ones the agent spits out.

Conversely, if you were on a team making internal software a decade or so ago, you know that when the cost of a project is spread over a single company and isn't the primary revenue driver, that it looks pretty messy: spreadsheets, some JSON files for configuration, a couple of bash scripts, maybe an HTML page generated from python with a report, and a crontab to run it all at 7 AM every day. It's messy but its also hyper specific, which is the real point.

Why wouldn't some vibe coded fix for a hard scheduling problem that only Bob in logistics deals with that cost $46 in credits be any different? It doesn't need to be sophisticated - it solves the problem, it's easy to modify by the person who knows the problem space the best; what would adding an agent, Postgres and a Telegram integration do to improve it? Probably not a lot, so Bob won't be taking that demo for your AI native app, Bob already moved on.

The SaaS era didn't arrive because a beautiful UI with a multi-tenant, microservice based, container fleet solves every problem perfectly. It was powered on the premise that an application could help solve an entire class of problems and became cost efficient when spread out over many customers. Bob might have bought a license to your app once upon a time, but that doesn't mean he was in love with it, he just did the math: (value of time saved + additional value - cost of license) > $0 . Now in 2026 we not only take that equation and swap the license cost for token cost; the "additional value" changes a bit as well - a hyper targeted solution is likely going to save more time or create a better outcome, so it creates more value. So we're left with the "time saved" being the real variable here; if you cannot use a terminal and have no desire to learn the basics of a coding agent from YouTube then perhaps your "time saved" is actually negative infinity, in which case a SaaS app is still really valuable. If the problem is very complicated or requires enoughb stakeholders, then the "time saved" may be sufficiently negative to also choose a SaaS app. For the rest of folks out there, the learning curve ain't that steep however.

So that's my take on this one — making full stack apps is fun but the future of software looks a lot like a warp speed version of internal software from 10 years ago - highly targeted and functional but messy, and everyone just gets back to working on the thing that's the actual revenue driver.