This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Dmitrii Rusanov
For the last few months I’ve had the same weird experience over and over again.
I’d go looking for an app — notes, voice notes, flashcards, VPN, some productivity thing — and at first it would look good. Nice landing page, polished UI, confident copy, some “AI-powered” label on top. For the first five minutes I’d think, okay, maybe this is the one.
Then the same thing would happen.
It wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
Not bad. Just… wrong in a very specific way.
Too many features I didn’t need. Missing one thing I actually cared about. Locked behind a subscription too early. Data going to someone else’s servers. “AI features” that were basically just a few fixed prompts with a paywall on top.
And after trying enough of these apps, I started thinking something slightly dangerous:
why am I still adapting myself to software, instead of software adapting itself to me?
A few years ago that thought wouldn’t really matter, because building your own version of something was expensive. Not just in money, but in time, attention, and effort. Even if some product annoyed you, you still usually had to accept it, because the alternative was building a whole app yourself, which sounded ridiculous.
Now it doesn’t sound ridiculous anymore.
That’s the part I don’t think people fully appreciate yet.
I started learning React Native and, mostly out of irritation, ended up building my own notes app. Not because I had some grand vision about “disrupting productivity”. I just wanted private notes, voice notes, and a workflow that didn’t annoy me.
The biggest pain for me was voice notes.
A lot of apps can transcribe voice now. That’s not the interesting part anymore. The interesting part is what happens after transcription.
Because raw transcription is often not useful at all.
People don’t speak in finished paragraphs. We ramble, restart, add filler, change direction in the middle of a sentence, remember something halfway through, and then the app politely gives us back a wall of text that feels like a transcript of confusion.
So now you still have to clean it up manually.
At that point, transcription didn’t solve much.
I didn’t want “voice to text”. I wanted something closer to “voice to usable thought”.
So I made something where I could just dump thoughts naturally, then say things like:
- “make this a grocery list”
- “rewrite this cleaner”
- “turn this into a plan”
- “mark milk as done”
and actually have the note change.
That felt way more natural to me than opening another edit screen and manually fixing everything with a keyboard.
And because privacy was another thing that kept bothering me, I built it around control too: encrypted notes, my own passphrase, optional own OpenAI API key, and even the ability to connect an OpenAI-compatible Whisper / LLM backend.
I wasn’t trying to build a startup.
I was trying to stop being annoyed.
The weird thing is that once I built one tool for myself, I started looking at all software differently.
Because this isn’t just about notes.
It’s the same story with so many products.
A personal Duolingo.
A personal Notion.
A personal AI assistant.
A personal finance tracker.
A personal CRM.
A personal notes app that works exactly how your brain works.
That’s the idea that keeps getting stuck in my head.
Maybe the future is not one perfect product for millions of people.
Maybe the future is millions of weird little personal tools.
Not because everyone suddenly wants to become a founder. Not because everyone dreams of managing a SaaS. But because the cost of building software that fits your own life is dropping so fast that “I’ll just make my own version” is becoming a normal thought.
And honestly, once that thought becomes normal, something big changes.
Because a huge amount of SaaS exists for one reason: building your own alternative used to be too expensive.
Now that assumption is weakening.
People keep saying “SaaS is not dead”, and maybe in the broadest sense that’s true. Fine. Big platforms are not disappearing tomorrow. Social networks still have network effects. Marketplaces still have network effects. Tools that depend on shared ecosystems still have structural advantages. Distribution still matters. Trust still matters. Reliability still matters.
But I also think people are being too comfortable when they say that.
A lot of small SaaS products are standing on much shakier ground than they realize.
If your product is basically a workflow wrapper around models, an API, and a clean UI, then AI doesn’t just help you build faster — it also helps your users replace you faster.
That’s the part that feels different now.
The old SaaS promise was: \n don’t build it yourself, just pay us.
The new question is: \n what if building it yourself is suddenly cheap enough?
And yes, people will say that AI-generated apps are messy, unreliable, fragile, ugly, or hacked together. Sure. Sometimes they are. But that argument gets weaker every few months. The models improve, the tooling improves, agents improve, local models improve, and the amount of pain required to make something useful keeps going down.
I don’t think everyone becomes a hardcore programmer.
But I do think more people become something like software shapers.
They’ll describe what they want, iterate with AI, reject bad outputs, refine workflows, connect tools, and slowly end up with software that fits them better than a polished product built for thousands of strangers.
That changes the whole emotional relationship with software.
You stop asking, “Which app should I buy?”
You start asking, “Could I just make the version I actually want?”
And if that becomes normal, then what exactly remains valuable?
That’s the part I keep thinking about.
Maybe the value shifts away from the app itself and toward the layers underneath it.
Compute. \n Models. \n Storage. \n Identity. \n Sync. \n Security. \n Hosting. \n Payments. \n Infrastructure. \n Distribution. \n Trust.
Maybe the interface becomes temporary.
Maybe the workflow becomes personal.
Maybe the “app” turns into something fluid that gets generated around the user, not something fixed that the user has to squeeze themselves into.
That sounds exciting if you like building things.
It sounds slightly terrifying if your business depends on being the default workflow product in a category that users can now recreate for themselves.
I think that’s why this feels like the beginning of something, not the end.
Not “software dies”. Not “all SaaS disappears”. More like: the ground under software is shifting.
And I think we can already see the early signs.
I felt it with note-taking.
I felt it with voice notes.
I felt it when I built a VPN app for myself because I didn’t like the existing options.
And the craziest part is not that I built them.
The craziest part is that it no longer feels exceptional.
It feels increasingly normal.
That’s new.
Five years ago this would sound like developer fantasy. Today it feels like the obvious direction of travel.
So I keep coming back to the same question.
If personal software becomes cheap to create, cheap to modify, and easy enough to run, what do we still buy?
Do we keep paying for generic SaaS because it is convenient and stable?
Do we move into a world where everyone has their own custom stack of little tools?
Do we end up with a strange hybrid where public platforms stay dominant, but everything else becomes personal and generated?
I honestly don’t know.
But I do think the direction is real.
And I think the winners will not be the people who sit around waiting for AI-generated software to become “perfect”.
It will be the people who aggressively use these tools to solve their own problems faster than everyone else.
That feels like the real shift.
I built Vaulto Note because I wanted private notes, useful voice notes, and more control over my own data. You can use your own API key, your own OpenAI-compatible backend, or just use it normally if you want convenience.
Here it is if you’re curious: \n https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vaultonotemobile
But honestly, the app is not even the most interesting part anymore.
The bigger question is this:
Are we still building SaaS, or are we slowly moving toward a world of personal software?
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This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Dmitrii Rusanov
Dmitrii Rusanov | Sciencx (2026-05-13T03:47:01+00:00) Is SaaS still the future, or are we moving toward personal software?. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2026/05/13/is-saas-still-the-future-or-are-we-moving-toward-personal-software-2/
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