“The hottest new programming language is English.” – Andrej Karpathy
❓ What You’ll Learn
- How did Marc Lou rebuild beehiiv in a few prompts?
- Which open-source scheduler reached $326,687 /mo by selling to AI agents?
- How can you earn from open-source apps?
- Why did a $31,000/mo tool spawn two free rebuilds in October?
- How does Ghost earn millions from hosting when anyone can run its code free?
- How did a viral decompiler’s lookalike repo ship a trojan?
- Why are coding agents starting to decompile desktop apps, not just websites?
💎 Why It Matters
Paid software tools now get rebuilt in days and sold for less.
🔍 Problem
You pay more each year for software that barely changes.
💡 Solution
Anyone can rebuild a paid tool with AI and sell the copy for less.
🏁 Players
Open-Source Alternatives
- Postiz • Buffer alternative that AI agents can drive.
- Ghost • Publishing platform that sells hosting of its free code.
- MailCheap • beehiiv rebuild billed per email sent.
- Plausible • Cookie-free analytics on one lightweight dashboard.
- Rybbit • Google Analytics alternative with a paid cloud.
- TryPost • Flat-priced scheduler for unlimited accounts and seats.
- Opencom • Intercom rebuild with live chat and tickets.
- Minilytics • Free DataFast rebuild on Cloudflare’s free plan.
App Cloning Tools
- Hex-Rays IDA MCP • The IDA disassembler’s official connector for AI agents.
- REA • Lets coding agents take apart compiled apps.
- ai-website-cloner-template • Claude Code template that rebuilds any site.
🔮 Predictions
- Software price increases will push more customers to rebuild the subscription tool and sell cheaper copies.
- Marc Lou rebuilt beehiiv with prompts after its 3rd price increase.
- New GitHub repos calling themselves an “open source alternative” rose from 378 to 1,427 year over year.
- Most new open-source copies of paid tools will be built for AI agents to run.
- Postiz grew from $45,000 /mo to $326,687 by October after selling to AI agents.
- MailCheap lets agents run any action through one connector.
- Projects that sell hosting of their open-source code will bar rival hosts in their licences.
- MinIO archived its community repo and steers users to its paid AIStor.
- Redis switched to host-blocking licences that stop cloud providers reselling it.
- HashiCorp moved Terraform to a licence that bars rival hosts.
- Its users forked it as OpenTofu instead of paying for HashiCorp’s hosted version.
☁️ Opportunities
- Launch a cheaper hosted rebuild of a tool that just raised its prices.
- beehiiv raised Lite plan 30% to $139 /mo at 10,000 subscribers on October 1.
- MailCheap showed $421 from 19 subscriptions 9 days after launch.
- Run managed hosting for one popular open-source app.
- Clawdi shows $2,015 /mo hosting managed OpenClaw for buyers who do not want to run their own server.
- SetupClaw shows $1,432 /mo setting OpenClaw up for buyers.
- Ship an open-source tool that AI agents can operate end-to-end.
- TryPost ships a connector so Claude or Cursor can schedule posts.
- Postbase lets Claude and ChatGPT post to social networks.
- Start a directory of open-source alternatives for one category.
- OpenAlternative earns $6,183 /mo from its directory.
- Google suggests “beehiiv open source alternative” as people type.
🏔️ Risks
- Lookalike Malware • Install clone tools from the official repo, since a REA lookalike shipped a trojan.
- Legal Claims • Rebuild from public docs and APIs, since an IP scholar doubts ArtCraft’s clean-room claim.
🔑 Key Lessons
- Raise prices and customers become competitors. Marc Lou launched a rebuild the month beehiiv’s new prices went live.
- Rebuild the tool you resent paying for. Other people resent it too.
🔥 Hot Takes
- Software margins reflected how expensive it was to copy code. Emailing 10,000 people weekly costs about $4 /mo to send at SES list rates.
- The SaaS stock selloff was a pricing correction. Software was priced for a world where copying it took 1 team and 1 year before AI agents could rebuild apps in days.
😠 Haters
“You can build a mail server. Nobody will deliver your email.”
Self-hosted mail is hard to keep out of spam folders. Amazon’s email service puts an account under review when 5% of its emails bounce, so most rebuilds send through a managed provider like Amazon SES and remove subscribers who stopped opening.
“AI-written code is full of security holes.”
AI-generated code passes security checks 56% of the time. Read the code that touches money and logins first.
“Anyone can clone your clone of a paid tool.”
Marc Lou’s paid analytics tool DataFast made $31,114 in 30 days and still drew 2 free rebuilds in October. Nevo David asks people to launch Postiz alternatives on purpose, since each launch post mentions him and sends him buyers.
“Clones of clones make selling rebuilds a race to the bottom.”
Prices fall toward what an app costs to run. Nevo David saw rivals in his niche earning under $1,000 /mo, so he paused features for 2 months to make Postiz faster and more reliable. Compete on reliability and charge for it.
🔗 Links
- The SaaSpocalypse Is Here • An engineer has Claude rebuild an email app on $250 of credits.
- Beehiiv Creators Buzz About a Price Increase • Creator pushback on the hike that made rebuilds look cheaper.
- Cal.com After a $25M Series A • How an open-source Calendly copy turned free code into paid seats.
- Ghost 6.0 and $100M Publisher Earnings • Why open-source publishing still funds a growing hosted business.
📈 What else?
Trends PRO #0188: Reverse-Engineered Apps has more insights.
What you’ll get:
- 50 Players (355% more)
- 8 Predictions (167% more)
- 8 Opportunities (100% more)
- 4 Risks (100% more)
- 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
- 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
- 9 Links (125% more)
With Trends Pro you’ll learn:
- (📈 Pro) Which scheduler charges a flat $19 for unlimited accounts?
- (📈 Pro) Which help desk bundles $10 of AI usage into each seat?
- (📈 Pro) What share of teams already swapped a SaaS tool for an in-house build?
- (📈 Pro) Which scheduler sells its pro features for $299 once?
- (📈 Pro) Which host pays app authors 20% of what it earns?
- (📈 Pro) Which fast-growing mail server has had no commits since June?
- And much more…
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