Why Would I Pay For That?

Death by a Thousand Subscriptions

Small business owners know the feeling. Every problem has a tool, and every tool has a monthly fee. Fifteen dollars here for invoicing. Twenty there for a website checker. Another twelve for the thing that makes the forms.

None of it is expensive on its own. All of it together is a couple hundred dollars a month leaving your account for software you use for about ninety seconds at a time.

Most of these tools weren't complicated. I could see exactly what they did. And for the first time, thanks to this new generation of AI coding tools, building it myself was no longer a long, drawn-out, expensive process.

So now that I know how to build it, what exactly should I build?

"I Can Just Build That"

My AI coding phase started with Replit, and the hype seemed greater than the promises, for sure. But as I hopped every week to whatever IDE was trending, the platforms kept improving, making coding fast and lightweight.

After a couple of years, you can spin up a simple working app pretty quickly. So with less of a time investment, what should I build?

So I built one tool. Then another. Then another, and you get the point. A website SEO audit. A security and compliance scan. QR-code invoicing so customers could scan to pay. A no-account task manager you could hand to a contractor with a single link. A customer intake-form generator.

If I found myself wishing something existed, I just made it exist. That is a genuinely strange sentence to be able to write, and I still haven't fully gotten over it.

The Part Where I Became the Villain

Then the story turns. I looked at this pile of working tools I'd built and thought, well, since I made them, I may as well sell them. Subscriptions. Tiers. The whole model. It made sense. Everyone else was doing it.

So I put up paid plans. And then very few people paid. Closer to none.

I could give you a dozen reasons why. The market's crowded. My distribution wasn't properly planned. I built a thousand user-friendly features before testing real demand. I hadn't built trust yet. All true. But sitting there refreshing a dashboard with no signups, waiting for someone to subscribe to my little tools, I finally saw what I'd actually done.

The mirror had been there the whole time. I just wasn't looking at it. Now I see. Now what? I'd already invested the time and energy, and I was proud of what I built.

So I Made Them Free

No trials. No paid tier. No "unlock premium." Most of them don't even ask you to sign up. You show up, you use the tool, you leave. That's the whole transaction.

I won't pretend this was a calculated growth strategy, because it wasn't. It was mostly me deciding I'd rather be the kind of person who genuinely helps than just another cog in the system.

The first time I saw in analytics that a real person had run one of my tools and gotten something useful out of it, I felt more satisfied than any paywall ever would have made me. Well, maybe not better than a deposit ding, but still very satisfying.

These are just tools I could have used, and still use myself, now sitting where anyone else can grab them.

What This Is Really About

I didn't write this to talk about the tools. If you never touch a single one, that's fine. The more people who use them, the more they cost me, so I mean that. But I hope you do use them and get some good free value out of it.

The bigger point is that I think something quietly changed, and a lot of people haven't clocked it yet.

For most of my life, "I wish this existed" and "I could make this exist" were separated by a wall. On one side were the people who had ideas. On the other side were the people who could build them. I spent two decades wrestling with which ideas were worth building, always from the wrong side of that wall.

That wall is coming down. Not for everyone, not evenly, and not without effort. The truth is, production applications still shouldn't be vibe coded, and most enterprise-ready IDEs still have a real learning curve you have to traverse. But the barrier is much more manageable now. Time has sped up.

And for micro-services, I'll ask you the same thing: why are you paying for that?

If You Want It, Build It

We're in a new era. If you want it, just build it.