The Age of Personal Software

October 29, 2026

The Age of Personal Software

What a great time to be a builder.

If you spent any time on X this month, you probably saw the beehiiv debate.

Here's the quick version. Marc Lou left beehiiv after its third price increase in two years. He says his bill was headed from $1,000 a year to $4,000. So he vibe coded his own newsletter platform.

Then beehiiv's CEO, Tyler Denk, posted a list. It's everything you'd need if you want to vibe code a beehiiv alternative over the weekend. It's a long list. Deliverability is near the top, along with a team of experts who work on it.

Marc's answer was to launch his platform as MailCheap. He called it 83% cheaper than beehiiv.

That kicked off a lot of hot takes from developers and founders. Here's mine.

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He's right

You are not going to vibe code beehiiv overnight. Or Salesforce. Or any big app like that. I've been saying this for a while. Big products do a lot of hard, boring work well, and that takes years to build.

But that's not the whole story

If you send thousands of emails a week, you probably need beehiiv. You need the ad network, the podcast tools, all of it. At that scale, the price makes sense. It's a great product.

I should be clear about where I stand. I'm a beehiiv customer. This email is going out on beehiiv right now. I'm not leaving the platform. But I understand the economics behind Marc's decision.

Still, a lot of us just need a way to send email. We don't need everything else.

I've felt this with a lot of tools. Notion is a great product, but I only use part of it. I record with Ecamm, but I never use it to live stream. I'm good at Premiere Pro now, but I'm not a professional editor. I skip most of what it can do.

Subscription fatigue

You know the feeling. You find a new product that looks great. Then you see the price, and it's another monthly subscription. So you hesitate. Maybe you close the tab.

I feel that all the time now. If a tool is essential to my work, I'll happily pay for it. But I think we're all paying for too much right now.

And for years I stitched these tools together. Notion here, a calendar there, something else to glue it all together. It worked, but it never worked the way I work.

So I started building my own

That's what pushed me to build Content OS, which is now Publishwell. It pulls the parts of Notion and my calendar I actually used into one place. I'm building Wrap, my own Mac recorder, to replace Ecamm and most of what I did in Premiere. And I built Clearing, because there's great productivity software out there, just not built the way I want to use it.

I'm not trying to rebuild beehiiv. I'm building the small slice I use, shaped around how I work.

SaaS isn't dead

There's a lot of hype right now that "SaaS is dead." I don't buy it.

SaaS companies may not hit the numbers they used to. But they build for a real audience, and that audience is still there.

Let's be honest about who's doing this. It's a small group. Nobody is vibe coding their own Microsoft Office. My neighbor isn't vibe coding the next great piece of software. They might vibe code something small for themselves. Maybe in a couple of years we'll get further. But we're not there yet.

A great time to be a builder

What has changed is this. If you can build, you can now build software for an audience of one. That used to be a waste of time. Now it might be the best use of a weekend.

There's professional software, and there's personal software. The age of personal software is here. It has never been a better time to be a builder.

So what's your take?

Is everybody doing this now? Are you building your own personal software? Or is it just me and a small group of developers?

And if you don't write code for a living, I really want to hear from you. Are you building things too?

Hit reply and tell me.

Happy Coding,
Dan Vega
https://www.danvega.dev

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