Sebastian

I think we all have to accept the $20/month micro-SaaS was a temporary glitch in the internet economy. It worked because Google sent you customers for free and software was still too difficult for those customers to build themselves. AI is killing both advantages at once. The customer no longer searches for your screenshot formatter, converter or tiny dashboard. He asks Claude to make one in 10 minutes. Indie hackers are especially exposed because they disproportionately sell to technically curious founders, the exact people most willing to spend three hours recreating a $20/month tool to avoid paying for it. Selling software to software founders now is like opening a restaurant exclusively for people who love cooking at home. Apps used to sit between the user and the task. Now ChatGPT, Claude or another agent increasingly owns the user relationship and decides which tools get used. The danger is not only that the lab replicates your feature. It can reduce your company to an invisible API supplier, or stop calling you entirely. What survives will probably be the stuff that is annoying to reproduce: licences, regulatory approvals, proprietary data, physical operations, painful integrations, networks, reputation and human accountability. The code is no longer the asset, accumulated friction is. Apps may survive where coordination matters, not where execution matters. Claude can create a converter or analyse a file because there is one user, one input and one output. It is much worse at replacing systems where many people, permissions, records and incentives need to remain synchronised.