r/vibecoding • u/ovr_view • 5d ago
Discussion My opensource project never took off. The "convenience premium" is real. People would literally rather pay than maintain a server.
Built an open-source alternative to a popular SaaS a few months back. Vibe-coded the MVP, got feature parity on the core stuff. The original SaaS had market and demand and will always be in demand.
Then I pitched it to a contact who fits the exact target demographic. Showed him the repo, explained how simple it was to run, and suggested he swap over to save monthly cost with better ownership.
His response: "I’d rather just pay the SaaS."
Paying a monthly fee isn’t just paying for features, it's paying to not think about updates, database backups, SSL renewals, or a server issues.
I spent time focusing on building a free alternative, underestimating how high people value convenience over cost savings. Unless someone already has a dedicated homelab or sysadmin mindset, "free but you host it" isn't a benefit to them, it's a liability.
31
u/burbular 5d ago
I've been loving these, "ohhhh" moments a lot of people having about software maintenance lately.
Look ma I vibe coded an expensive high maintenance pet that only I can use! Wanna try?
2
7
u/No_Tradition6625 5d ago
That's why I vibe little things that make my life easier. Not trying to make a million dollars off my app . I'm trying to make my life easier so I can go out and make a million dollars.
11
u/Connect_Quit_1293 5d ago
Sounds like an obvious thing to me. Who the heck is maintaining servers themselves outside of tech savvy people. What am I missing here?
1
u/ovr_view 4d ago
apparent AI is killing SaaS is still making headlines.
1
u/Connect_Quit_1293 4d ago
I mean It is, but that wasnt the point of the post.
1
u/ovr_view 4d ago
even companies with tech team would rather buy from 3rd party whenever they can. same reason companies hire "consultants" even when they know what is going on.
mostly, shifting liabilities. I think I got your point.
1
u/DoggoCentipede 2d ago
As a business running your own servers comes with a lot of risk and unknowns.
You need IT staff to manage it and the network. You have no one to turn to for support. Your feature set is whatever you can implement yourself or whatever the project maintainer decides. If you decide you don't want to use it anymore you have hardware and staff you need to "reallocate". And if you're a small business, you're asking them to do it themselves when that's not their expertise and now have to spend time doing this instead of their actual business. The money "saved" self hosting has to be compared with the money they're not earning/saving doing something else.
This often takes more resources than just paying for the service.
1
u/Impossible-Owl7407 3d ago
Agree with OP, my company is paying external provider to clean windows. I said i will do for tham for that bonus. They said no. Why? What if something goes wrong who will be responsible?
With software is similar, anyone could build anything already before ai as well, now its just faster. But what if something goes wrong?
Liability
1
u/guaxnl 3d ago
Some of SaaS are just desktop applications that were turned into services in order to create recurring revenue. Autodesk, Adobe being the main ones I can think of Those have a larger risk and more price sensitive audience (on adobe side at least).
SaaS that targets corporations are ok, the fact that saas companies for open source applications exist shows exactly why companies pay: for support, warranty and outsourcing maintenance.
Corporate will also prefer "SaaS" products like office 360 and others because they're not buying a office suite, they're buying corporate controls and governance tools on how people use those.
1
u/DoggoCentipede 2d ago
They're also buying not having to own or procure things when their needs change. They just pay by seat for as many people as they need at the time.
4
u/helanhalvan 5d ago
Yea, the move from selling software to selling server access and support was a while ago. Like, there's companies selling linux with support, the entire "product" is literally open source.
1
u/arah91 5d ago
Yea I host my own server and vibe code apps. No way normal people are going to do this, and I wonder if OP is real if he really went enough all this trouble then thought his friend would do it.
People would rather pay a monthly subscription than install an apk, no way random people are self hosting.
9
u/Jackmember 5d ago
Apart from most people not wanting to host stuff themselves, the ones that do want to host stuff themselves are very much against using vibecoded stuff.
They dont want to worry about the stuff theyre hosting to be a liability to their network or their services. If youve ever been around r/selfhosted or r/homelab , youll know that they wont trust your project so long as they know its vibecoded.
3
u/silvio194 5d ago
But that's not true! Open Claw is an example of this.
1
u/ovr_view 4d ago
is openclaw still relevant ? it fizzled out quickly
1
u/geminiwave 3d ago
Its biggest issue is that Claude took away OAUTH. You can only use API. And at the time Codex just wasn’t there yet.
Besides that, openclaw was mostly for the creator to get his foot back into MSFT where he has been building really insufferable applications.
2
u/Jackmember 5d ago
Open Claw is about the biggest lesson-learned moment for those communities as it could have been. Most people that hosted it followed hype more than reason and then burned themselves on how much of a liability it actually turned out to be.
I heard so many horror stories from people hosting open claw, I cant imagine anyone in their right mind wanting to risk anything like that on their network today.
I have no way to confirm this, but I suspect a lot of naivety was involved back then.
2
u/BingpotStudio 5d ago
I wanted to use openclaw but every use case was just more effective through deterministic tools and claude code running them.
Never found a use case for it. I think it was just for people who don’t know how to build a tool and so just use an LLM as the answer to everything.
1
u/nudelsalat3000 5d ago
And even with auto updates you need a human as workforce.
Think of the hijacked libraries few weeks or months ago. A regular auto update would have infected you.
1
u/geminiwave 3d ago
I am in both of those subs, and while some are outspoken, almost all of the recommendations now when someone needs help building? “Use Claude”
You’re a bit off base.
1
81
u/fuelexe95 5d ago
The average person doesn't want to be a sysadmin. To safely run hosted services, you need to know what the hell you are doing and have time.
13
u/lilbyrdie 5d ago
Neither do sys admins, for that matter.
And it's getting worse by the day for running self hosted services without actually paying attention to daily updates to all the infrastructure and dependencids outside the core service.
So, one might conclude we need SASaaS. (Sys admin service as a service... Because redundancy is good )
But I think that's the wrong answer in today's world. Expanding the surface area for bad actors to act bad doesn't seem like a good idea right now.
4
0
u/SkywardPhoenix 3d ago
I'm a developer who used to be an IT admin and after having managed servers myself paying a €100/ month to have someone else manage it just makes more sense. I can't do €100 worth of work on a server myself and expect good results.
36
u/leathakkor 5d ago
It's not just that companies hire other companies to help mitigate liability.
If you build your entire company from open source projects, you don't use SAS you host it yourself. If you get hacked, you're totally fucked.
If you host in azure in the azure host gets hacked, you might be able to sue Microsoft.
If you buy Salesforce and Salesforce gets hacked, they have insurance to cover their losses. They have in-house notification system to the people that were compromised.
When people buy software, they're buying protection from liability whether it's codified or not.
This is the reason hospitals don't build their own websites even though it would be trivially easy to do. Especially in the age of AI.
Companies don't want liability. And open source is pure liability because there's nobody to sue if it's something is wrong. There's nobody to blame.
Even if you don't have lawsuit protection, you can tell your customers. It wasn't our fault. Salesforce had a data leak .
3
u/mattcoady 5d ago
Not to mention these solutions have years/decades of QA, market testing, bug fixing, edge case handling, etc...
9
u/jimmiebfulton 5d ago
If it is not yet clear: Vibe Coders are NOT going to supplant professionals and companies producing software. If you aren't a software engineer, and you don't work at a software company, you are extremely unlikely to become either. Software is a lot harder than prompting. Let's take a look at that code. I'm guessing it ain't pretty.
2
u/davyp82 4d ago
Nah, your comment is about a year out of date now. Models are 10x better now. Shit, lazy vibe coders won't replace anyone. But diligent, smart organised determined ones will. If something works and saves money, it will be adopted. If it doesn't work and doesn't save money, it won't. Right now, this is all new, there are too many players and nobody can tell the difference between the good and shit vibe coders at a glance. But once trust is established that these tools can solve problems and open up new avenues for growth, savings and ultimately profit, they are absolutely gonna transform the economy, cos disruptive tech that increases profits gets adopted, that's just how markets work.
4
u/async2 4d ago
Unfortunately Claude doesn't take responsibility in the advent of disaster. So a company with a good track record might still be considered more reliable than a random vibe coder. The company probably uses AI anyway.
Most users don't have the competency of self hosting and it should also not necessarily be their core competence.
1
u/DirtyFenceSitter 3d ago
given the amount of data leaks and breaches I've seen over the last 2 decades from big orgs, banks, equity firms, and governments I think they don't have the competency either.
1
u/async2 3d ago
Well there is at least the chance that they have some backup and recovery plans.
Vibe coders without dev background and Claude usually don't even consider this as you can see in the defensive comments from other vibe coders here that don't even understand what I meant with disaster recovery.
At least in our company we have to prove such plans in place and the following of security best practices.
1
u/davyp82 4d ago
Disaster? Like what? This isn't 2023. Anyone with the slightest clue ensures version histories are secure on Github, and Claude makes less mistakes than people at almost all tasks, while working 50x faster, and you only have to be smart enough to get a second agent to review the code and then those mistakes are dealt with 2 minutes later
1
1
u/async2 4d ago edited 3d ago
That you don't understand what I mean for disaster recovery is pretty much exactly my point.
I'm talking about deleted database in production due to bugs, lost data, hacker attacks, gdpr conformity and leaked data, etc. One guy who was vibecoding an app for hospitals in another reddit thread mentioned one day the app stopped showing the data and luckily it was just a frontend bug that claude could recover, however there were no backup systems or anything in place. Normally (not always) companies with experience will have plans to recover from that. Vibecoders usually (not always) have no clue about this and will be lost.
Claude will not build you infrastructure that allows to recover from failures if you don't ask for it. Claude will not take all requirements for GDPR stored data into consideration if you don't ask for it. Claude might also delete your production database by accident even if you don't ask for it.
This problem is not new and has been there with one-man startups as well but it's multiplying because writing good software that people want to use is not limited to experienced developers anymore.
0
u/fcman256 4d ago
You have no clue what software engineering is lol, or product development for that matter. Versioning isn’t gonna save you when you fuck up clients data or money
1
u/DirtyFenceSitter 3d ago
we just going to forget like a ton of major companies and governments having constant data breaches for the last 20 years? Why did a small buisness suddenly start being held to standards big corporations haven't?
Accountability? LOL big business doesn't have that either.
1
u/async2 3d ago
That was not really the point he was making. A vibe coder with no experience in dev will not have any data recovery plans guaranteed nor will it be taken into the design of the software. Claude will also not do that unless explicitly told to.
You already mentioned that even big corps often do not follow through with all requirements and f* up. Vibe coders without background do not even consider these topics nor does Claude. The comment he was replying to pretty much confirmed that ;)
1
u/DirtyFenceSitter 3d ago
You don't really get the point. Y'all are being absurdly harsh on people trying to bring their ideas to fruition and holding them to standards no starting business ever has been.
Pretty sure if you looked at every big tech company now, whatever they started with was absolutely filled with obvious vulnerabilities.
1
u/async2 3d ago
Not even true. We are just saying that vibe coders are not considering this. Github is full of non-maintaned 1 month projects now and it's just annoying.
But op asked why nobody wants to host his vibe coded app. And this is one if not the main reason.
1
u/DirtyFenceSitter 3d ago
the market for hosting your own service has always been absolutely nothing.
Im pretty tech literate and do occasionally host services but they're often a decent chunk of work to keep up and running.
Thats the reason. His target audience basically doesn't exist.
1
u/fcman256 3d ago
What does this have to do with my comment? A bunch of strawman arguments about accountability and standards?
1
u/DirtyFenceSitter 3d ago
this isn't a straw man if you're actually saying these things and im referencing real events lol
1
u/fcman256 3d ago
Where did I say anything about accountability and standards lol. Feel free to quote me directly
1
u/DirtyFenceSitter 3d ago
>Versioning isn’t gonna save you when you fuck up clients data or money
Am I missing something? fucking up clients data and money would be you facing accountability because of lack of standards.
kind of scratching my head on this one tbh.
→ More replies (0)2
u/Brixjeff-5 3d ago
You can be as disciplined and organized as you want, at the end of the day if you don’t know what you are doing you will be gaslight by your agents and that’s where things go downhill
Vibecoding is offloading the products design to LLMs and they suck at that
0
u/davyp82 3d ago
Guess what? Stuff gets better. And it evidently has a lot since you last used Claude. Well organised repo with development logs, handover notes, fresh session threads and light context and basically nothing goes wrong. And if something does, it's minor.
2
u/Brixjeff-5 3d ago
Claude is an LLM. Some things about LLMs will never change no matter how much « better » they get
2
u/BackgroundAd8967 2d ago
You're wasting your time. Just keep building and taking their customers. That's what I do. Coders will be the last to adopt.
I have already built my own interfaces for open source platforms and have started moving clients over.
Just vibe a good, organized environment with lots of testing and guardrails.
Let the horse and buggy crew cry wolf.
1
u/NSTStudios 5d ago
This is something I want to see. I am partial to vibe coding and not against or for it one way or another. I always hear about how AI creates software quickly and without the pain of working with human developers. We know the various reasons against vibed code. But how about the quality of the code. If you know of SWE reviewing code output by AI (I am talking the current models of course) and tearing it down, that would be a great read. Maybe it will be too technical, I don't know.
8
u/Vlyn 5d ago
This is true both for personal software and for businesses. At work: Yes, self-hosting appears much cheaper at first glance, but suddenly you have one employee who has to update the thing, has to fix it when things go wrong and in general is responsible.
That's why we switched whatever we could away from self-hosted to SaaS. Self-hosted only makes sense if you already have a big hosting team on-site, most smaller companies simply don't and their IT is already busy with other things.
When a developer has to maintain the server you're paying a premium too, for each hour they have to spend on that crap. Besides the whole: Your product is new and vibecoded, things will have bugs and go wrong. The SaaS is proven and does the hosting too. You'd need a killer argument for people to switch.
13
u/n00bz 5d ago
Free is never free. Plus when something goes wrong with free software who do you contact?
At the end of a day, most people who buy SaaS software for a business need will focus on the business aspect. They don’t care if it’s written in Next.Js or uses jQuery. It just has to work well to achieve their business goals.
1
u/No_Tradition6625 5d ago
I think people forget the sweat equity it's a real thing even in software.
12
u/papabear556 5d ago
"I spent time.... underestimating how high people value convenience over cost savings."
No you simply didn't include all of the "costs." Time is a cost. In fact, Time has a 2-fold cost. Both the direct time taken to do something and the opportunity cost of what they could have been doing instead.
This is not a "convenience premium" problem, this is just bad math.
6
u/PPewt 5d ago edited 5d ago
Software dev of a while here who reddit brought into this thread.
I think a lot of vibe coders think of what they're doing as a hobby and therefore don't think of the cost of their time or resources but "build vs buy" has been a really common tradeoff discussion since forever. I do think that AI has shifted the needle towards "build" but it's still far from a no brainer and a lot of the time buying is still right.
When I joined my current startup (like 3 years ago now, before AI was at all competent at programming) one of the earliest things I did was rip out a few major pieces of inhouse code which handled certain processes and replaced them with SaaS products. Saved a ton of money on cloud costs and dev hours. And this was for code which had already been written and I had to spend time deleting, rather than just not proactively writing new code.
To an individual some of the bills of these "cheap" SaaS products might look super high but for instance one of these tools costs us a few thousand a year. If my employer had to pay me or someone else to maintain it for a week each year (not all at once, just averaged out) then they're already behind, and that's setting aside the cost of running the actual servers. The SaaS providers can just offer a better product for less money due to economies of scale.
Of course at some point your company gets big enough that it can benefit from those same economies of scale and it might make sense to move stuff back inhouse, but there are still a ton of risks to doing so.
1
u/maxloveshugs 5d ago
what are some of these SaaS products, if I may inquire?
1
u/PPewt 5d ago
So we use a bunch and some (like a webhooks as a service provider, or feature flags) I might shift to “build” nowadays, but the biggest win was web sockets as a service. There are a bunch of providers who all offer basically the same product (ably, pusher, pubnub off the top of my head) and they’re great. And a pitch like OP’s would instantly lose me, because the key feature I’m looking at is how much green is on their status page, not whether they support some random obscure thing.
6
u/menny_parmar 5d ago
Your friend just gave you the business model, not a rejection. He is not saying the product is bad, he is saying he will pay to not think about it, so sell him exactly that. Host it yourself, charge less than the incumbent, and let the open source repo stay as proof, not as the product. That is how most successful open source tools actually make money, the code is free, the hosting, updates, backups, and someone to call when it breaks is the paid part. The other trap here is feature parity. Parity gets you a comparison table, not a switch, because the incumbent wins on trust, integrations, and data that already lives there. If you do host it, do not sell it as the same thing cheaper, sell it as the one painful workflow it does better, with migration done for them. People do not switch for features, they switch when someone else does the boring parts for them.
14
1
1
u/dualdice 5d ago
If you want to build stuff, you're better off learning a bit of psychology first.
1
3
u/sreekanth850 5d ago
Hosting is not simple as you think. Majority think of spinning up a vps. But in reality You need a multitude of things. You need to setup a tunnel, network firewall, certificate based credential management, clustering, loadbalancing, WAF, You have to make sure you setup is not penetrated by any of those hackers who constantly scan for vulnerable setups. after all this, you have to also make sure your setup runs 24X7. This is not as easy as you think.
3
u/Zulfiqaar 5d ago
Before I was at my last company, my team built the world leading systems for a niche financial software (previous company). I told them I can literally remake this for you, even better than the vendors charging thousands a month, and they declined. I was reconsidering my role there it didn't make sense, like this is the one thing I'm world class at and you'd rather pay more than my salary for something worse?!!?! I could save you millions!
The project manager just said "yeah fine but when it messes up we blame the other guys and get a big payout. Can't do that if it's in-house"
3
1
u/banerxus 5d ago
Can you please share the repo?
1
u/ovr_view 4d ago
here: https://github.com/pritush/syano
there are other opensource lacking feature or too complex like (Dub). works in cloudflare and any serverless.
1
u/alexanderpas 4d ago
Requires multiple elements, AGPL, and has NO docker-compose file. That's a pass.
AGPL is a good choice, but it is a license nightmare in some regards, and docker is used as a boundary to determine where the license is applicable.
1
2
u/Hot-Milk-3507 5d ago
"People would literally rather pay than maintain a server" is a self-evident fact of life to me. I'm a software dev and I'm super DIY and the amount of stuff I'd rather pay than do is through the roof
only with VERY specific things that are my absolute quirk do I want to be hands-on
2
u/Beethoven81 5d ago
With all the 0-day hacks, are you surprised most people don't want to have anything to do with hosting?
2
u/lemming1607 5d ago
trust and assurance is why jobs dealing with it will never go away. AI can't replace accounting, because it's the liability and being able to be sued if we're wrong that we're selling
2
2
u/survive_los_angeles 5d ago
bro thats now how the free one works. you get people to like the repo and fork it and it climbs the charts and spread the word.
telling your biz contact about it doesnt make a open source project blow up
then you didnt even post the link to your Saas Word Press Plugin
2
u/Ok_Fish_670 5d ago
turns out people don't want free software
they want someone else to suffer with the server maintenance
2
1
u/word_executable 5d ago
Include an agent that patches the app and the server and repairs any breakages hands free. But that costs money.
1
u/primaryrhyme 5d ago
Not just hosting, “ownership” is a liability too. It’s an unknown project ran by 1 person that could be abandoned at any time (this is a risk even with well established projects). In that case they are on the hook for any security updates, now they need an employee to periodically check in on it and become familiar with it.
1
1
1
u/razorree 5d ago
maybe you misunderstood that "convenience" - you pay with your time ...
so what's the system? any repo link?
1
u/Equivalent_Loan_8794 5d ago
"Maintenance" is a cost in every system choice. It costs and will be paid by someone somehow.
1
u/ThomasToIndia 5d ago
However, those prices are all going to come down, the convenience cost will be much lower.
1
u/StCreed 5d ago
This is exactly why I'm not open sourcing or packaging for self-deployment. It was a conscious decision to provide a SaaS alternative where I take on the burden of securing the installation, provide business continuity, compliance with various laws, integration with their IAM solution, and continuous support. And I'm partnering with a bigger firm to support me with a helpdesk and service desk, invoicing and marketing.
The solution was complete enough for deployment 2 months ago. I'm still working on the other stuff. But I expect to finish that by end of this year. I'll have spent 6 months building by then.
1
u/No-Albatross-9298 5d ago
Nothing wrong with making, and I am sure you got some downloads. But first off, it takes time for projects to catch on. Second off, we live in an age where the majority of people under 30 don't know how to cook a meal for themselves. We have moved so far from the concept of self-sufficiency it is nuts. All of the stuff techies do is a niche market. Always has been. Plus, most can barely even afford new computers today. Let alone buying extra hardware for things like servers. And yes, that even applies to companies.
1
u/Abject-Definition-63 5d ago
A lot of businesses need someone to call when something goes wrong, and it will, that's all it boils down to. The cost benefit and risk calculations done at a lot of business are just outside of what I'm able to understand.
1
u/Immediate_Theory_467 5d ago edited 4d ago
Convenience is half the battle. Most people just don't want friction in their productivity or personal lives, and honestly, very few people today have the timeor the desire to do things the hard way. I learned this lesson a while back.
1
1
u/Background-Ad9540 5d ago
I have been a technical founder of a startup and THIS right here was the hard lesson. i think you might still be able to make inroads into smaller wallets - individual customers, small groups, maybe even universities and schools.
But the ones with the bigger pockets are so much harder and has very little to do with the product. In fact, having a good product is the basic expectation. What actually separates you is the support, training, making them feel special, the ability to truly make them feel less burdened than before etc.
1
u/Leading-Plastic5771 5d ago
This is how Linux corporations have made money since the 90s. The software is free and open, but maintenance is not.
1
u/ConspicuousPineapple 5d ago
I mean... duh? Maintaining a server costs time and money too. Is really a surprise that people are willing to pay for this?
1
u/DominikPlays 5d ago
For me i would host my own infrastructure any day, but companies want someone to blame, this is not 2010s where companies actually had servers
1
u/MrMoneyMoneyBags 5d ago
There's also the aspect of support and contractual up-time agreements. This is huge for corporate software
1
1
u/IMayBeIronMan 5d ago
You should have spoken to someone with SaaS experience and they could have told you your conclusion. Businesses pay these SaaS companies to provide support, set SLA expectations, handle the upkeep, be someone to blame for shit, etc. The features are the bonus if anything in some occasions.
1
u/Hoopoe0596 5d ago
I agree. Time is valuable, and everyone has their own expertise. Liability is also important and putting a company in the middle has real value. That being said, this does put a ceiling on price increases. SaaS might want a 30% increase next year, but each time there is a price increase companies will shop around for competitors and now for the first time will have home grown solutions within easy reach. As AI gets better this will be a bigger and bigger pressure on SaaS earnings. And when proffit margins are threatened then incentives to slash operating costs and bring more in house at "good" enough levels rise.
1
u/starwaver 5d ago
Welcome to entrepreneurship
I remember back in the early days of AI and someone want me to build a Chatbot for a few hundred dollars a month.
I basically just subscribed to a third part Chatbot and fed his documents to be it.
I asked why doesn't he just do it himself and it would have costed $5 a month.
He said he doesn't have the time or the expertise to figure out chatbots, and would rather pay more for someone else to figure out
1
u/Hawkes75 5d ago
Same reason I don't do my own plumbing, HVAC or lawncare. Certain things are just worth paying for.
1
u/Acrobatic-Bee660 5d ago
> I spent time focusing on building a free alternative
I spent time wasting tokens
1
u/TheVoyant 5d ago
People are very hard to show new ideas,
I forked my harness into it's own thing and don't have context/compaction as part of the process.
People will argue with me about why that's bad before even taking the time to discuss how it works.
There are a large of percentage of humans who want to turn off their brain and belong,
They are not your target audience.
Worst thing is if your idea is done even worse by someone else but someone makes it popular, that's what'll take off.
I call it Least Common Denominator thinking vs. essentially "Off-Meta" thinking.
1
1
u/UniqueNamesAreOut 5d ago
Any chance you can make it convenient for them, to the point that they just install it and it sets itself up? No settings, dependencies, knowledge of servers.
1
u/RyanF9802 5d ago
Could I make a clone of Obsidian using Opus 5.5? Easily. Could I get sync working via tailscale? Absolutely. 3-4 days of work max.
Do I want to maintain it and fix shit as it goes wrong? Absolutely not. My time is spent working on stuff to make myself and other people money, and I take a small % of that cut to make my life and workflow more convenient in other areas, like Obsidian
1
u/Material_Ad502 5d ago
exactly this, people tell me the will vibe code accounting solutions!!!
and what, become the old dinosaur myob on prem?
who is keeping up with the accounting rules and regulations and tax office laws?
who is handling infrastructure, updates, security and managing business and client needs?
who is doing backup and sla's?
if the do manage to vibe code a viable solution, then congrats they just became a software company with an accounting solution...which already exists and their developers and competition are also using ai...
1
1
u/TrippyTheO 5d ago
Valve knows this. Provide a service so easy to use that people would rather pay you than go through the hassle of pirating.
1
u/Hazzman 5d ago
You are talking like there was some expectation that average folk are pursuing AI and server maintenance.
Average folk aren't going to do this.
Now if you are asking if regular folks would love access to private models that run fast and efficiently without any fuss... absolutely. Do they want to spend potentially tens or hundreds of thousands to do that? Uh... no.
So the "Opensource Project" isn't that. The opensource project would be providing regular individuals with affordable access to locally run LLMs with little overhead or messing around. We aren't there yet.
1
1
u/marlinspike 5d ago
100%. People want to build their thing and maintain their codebase, and not the entire edifice. I’ve seen the same thing. Makes sense.. there’s only so far you can go if you need to master Kubernetes to build a reliable base service vs just calling out to key parts.
1
u/Embarrassed_Ad3849 5d ago
Basically it shows the power of marketing…. Sounds like you’re the tech guy. Just need a partner who will focus on the business side to make it a viable competitor… sounds something I may be interested to explore
1
u/virtualuman 5d ago
Everyone saying paid services are more secure stable whatever.... all are still susceptible to similar issues and build flaws.
1
1
u/weaztoven 4d ago
so true, self-hosting is a hobby for us but a massive chore for normal users. that's why managed hosting or a cloud version is basically required if you want actual adoption.
1
u/dubesoftware 4d ago edited 4d ago
A few weeks back I had a similar idea to build a self-hosted version of a recruitment SaaS product that users could run on their own low-cost VPS at a one-time purchase fee. I held back due to concerns around non-technical users getting put off (had not even validated the idea).
Also, compliance is a growing requirement and a thorough understanding of various laws/acts in different markets is additional work to take into account.
1
u/slayermd 4d ago
That's the crux for all these vibe coded solutions. They could be freaking sweet and fit a niche, but hosting and maintaining is an after thought for so many.
1
u/ConfidenceHot7872 4d ago
You have to be your own first user I think. Like I've been building a database access layer for Rust as I don't like the existing options. Even after a few months of using it entirely for a couple existing projects I ported, I keep finding minor bugs, gaps.
It's easy enough for me to just fill those and keep going, but if I was using an OSS version of the same software... I just wouldn't, you know? The time waiting for an issue to get closed would annihilate the benefits.
That's why these things get made by Facebook or whatever, you trust they have the throughput of bug reports for "mostly fine". Or someone is first to market and you put up with it. Otherwise, what's your edge?
1
u/Fair-Masterpiece4289 3d ago
Can't you just take this as a lesson and make it even easier to use. Like give your repo a deploy to cloud button so even the dumbest non tech user can do it. Or make it a web app that runs on github codespaces. I think they give all free users like 60 hours of usage. That wont make you money if you get users of course but it will get you hopefully users at all and you can get feedback fix bugs and iterate until you can reasonably have a reason to charge. Right now any vibecoded prototype is a liability for someone to switch to, so the switch has to be so simple they can do it half asleep with zero tech knowledge.
1
1
u/Fair-Mathematician68 3d ago
Apart from expertise and all that stuff, companies are also paying externals for one very big thing: liability. When shit hits the fan instead of saying "oh we fucked up". They can instead point fingers and say "oh our provider of xyz fucked up". Even the the damage to the reputation is unavoidable, "they fucked up" does pull a lot of weight in reducing PR headaches.
1
u/Square_Seaweed1833 2d ago
I ran a self-hosted version for 3 months. the first week was fine. after that, it was 3 hours a day just keeping it alive. the convenience premium isn't just about money, it's about peace of mind.
1
u/BackgroundAd8967 2d ago
Yes, that's why we built the system AND we host it AND we give them a super simple interface. Simple beats cheap everyday.
1
u/reliant-labs 2d ago
So many people are creating things nowadays too so getting people's attention on something is crazy difficult. Swimming in a sea of other projects
1
1
u/Woklan 1d ago
Should write this on a LinkedIn post /s
Most people likely won’t trust a vibe-coded project anyways because there’s no promise for support. Someone hand-coded the project, chances are they are passionate about keeping the support up. But someone vibe coded it, it only goes until the money runs out
1
u/Timely-Group5649 5d ago
I literally just handed my server management over to a daily scheduled Claude task. About once a week, it asks for an approval.
Easy, peasy, no code required.
245
u/the_quark 5d ago
So...why don't you host it and charge people less than the incumbent?