Somewhere between the third price increase and the fifth app I'd stopped using, I started doing the math. I was paying for tools I'd half-settled for — clunky UIs, features locked behind another tier, pricing that crept up the moment I stopped paying attention. Switching always felt like more friction than it was worth. So I kept paying.
Until one of them paywalled something I'd been using for months. That was the day I stopped paying for other people's apps and started building my own.
Every app, same script
The app I just ditched isn't an outlier. Every platform we rely on runs the same script.
Friendly at the start. Locked in by the middle. Extracting maximum value by the end. Netflix raises prices and adds ads to the tier you used to pay to escape ads on. Instagram buries posts from the accounts you chose to follow so it can serve you ones you didn't. The little $12-a-month app you forgot about is the same mechanism in miniature: get you in cheap, make leaving annoying, charge for what used to be free.
Cory Doctorow has a name for it. He calls it enshittification. And it's not an accident.
The reason it keeps happening is because the incentives never change. Once a platform has you, it has no reason to keep being good to you. That's how a subscription you liked becomes a subscription you can't quite bring yourself to cancel.
Leverage, finally
Shopping around used to be the only move. Try a different app, go back to a spreadsheet, give up and keep paying. Those were the choices.
AI changed that. Anyone can just build the app, the website, the tracker, whatever they need.
I don't pay for a budgeting app anymore because I'm building my own. The first version took a weekend. It does exactly what I want. No upsells, no pushes to upgrade, no "we've updated our pricing" emails. When I want a feature, I add it. When I don't like how something works, I change it. The whole thing fits because I built it around my life, not the other way around.
Five years ago this would've taken months and a real engineering background. Now it takes a week and some curiosity. AI closed the gap between "I wish this existed" and "I built it."
This is the first real leverage regular people have had against the subscription economy in a long time.
The trap resets
There's a catch though. The tools we use to replace those apps are already following the same playbook.
The AI tools I use to build are getting more expensive every quarter. The no-code platforms everyone is excited about right now (Bolt, Lovable, Base44) are friendly because they're in the friendly phase. That doesn't last. Adobe already tested what happens when a vendor decides your creations belong to it. Substack and Medium and every "creator-friendly" platform pivoted the moment growth flattened. Every cheerful onboarding screen is the opening scene of the same movie.
If you build your app inside a platform you can't read, can't export, and can't host yourself, you didn't escape anything. You just moved into a nicer looking trap.
Know what you built
The defense isn't to stop building. It's to build with ownership in mind.
Learn enough to understand the code the AI gave you. Not all of it, not perfectly. Just enough to know what it's doing, where your data lives, and what would happen if the platform you're on doubled its price tomorrow.
People keep saying software engineering is dying because of AI. I think the opposite is true. In a time when everyone is vibe coding apps they don't understand, the people who actually understand what they built are the ones who get to keep what they built. Everyone else is one price hike away from being trapped again.
Own what you build
The escape hatch is real. AI genuinely gives regular people a way out of the extractive loop and into tools that fit their actual lives. I'm doing it. It works.
But autonomy only holds if you own what you built. Read the code. Keep your data. Pick tools you could walk away from.
Build your own. Then make sure it's actually yours.