The 30-bucks-a-month button you’ve been renting is dying. Not SaaS as a whole - just the boring chores.
Photoshop stays. Excel stays. But the swarm of tiny tools that resize, reformat, auto-export, and nag you for a “Pro” tier? Optional now. If you have basic engineering chops, you can ask a large language model - think coding bot - to build a tiny local tool that fits your exact workflow, spend about 30 to 50 dollars in tokens, and keep it forever. No seats. No lock-in. No paywall to click “Export.”
My AI research agent pulled the raw costs and the math is plain: two or three niche subscriptions add up to around 60 to 150 dollars a month. A one-off build is roughly 30 to 50 to get the scaffolding right, then near-zero to run locally unless you call paid APIs. Tweak it next month for another few bucks. Done.
Why this flipped now:
- Codegen is scaffolding, not magic. It spits out the boring glue fast, then you iterate.
- Laptops are strong. For light AI and file shuffling, local feels instant and private.