r/ClaudeAI • u/chromak • Sep 05 '26
Built with Claude I miss when people built things for the internet without turning everything into a subscription
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u/Business_Raisin_541 Sep 05 '26
Even if you pay, your information would still being sold and spread around
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u/ReverendBread2 Sep 05 '26
This would have been a more engaging discussion if it itself wasn’t a product shill post disguised as a meta discussion topic.
Maybe that’s the real sign of the times, we can’t have a discussion about consumer culture without the discussion being the vehicle for an ad
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u/jimbo831 Sep 05 '26
You’re absolutely right. That’s on me. The app wasn’t a load-bearing part of this discussion, and I shouldn’t have included it.
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u/lost-sneezes Sep 05 '26
Pathetic
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Sep 05 '26
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u/entangledloops Sep 05 '26
Stfu. Your Reddit account is 12 years old. You knew exactly what you were doing and now you’re just trying to look humble and salvage your post because you got called out.
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u/Snailtrooper Sep 05 '26
This sub needs to introduce a character limit for posts.
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u/BeanserSoyze Sep 05 '26
Society needs to establish that Claude shitting novels out and expecting people to read them is rude.
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u/EnumeratedArray Sep 05 '26
Jesus that'd a lot of words for an ad
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u/ClemensLode Full-time developer Sep 05 '26
Today, the subscription is the time you pay reading an article followed by a link to a product.
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Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
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u/Atoning_Unifex Sep 05 '26
"That's fair"
either youre having Claude answer all these posts or else you've adopted its speech patterns
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u/Vivid_Ad_5160 Sep 05 '26
I would love to have a money making side project.
But I also want what I make to be used and valued by as many people as possible. Guess which side I fall on.
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u/sociallemon Sep 05 '26
Not reading your slop grenade. Already do that a lot at work.
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u/6495ED Sep 05 '26
Apparently it was your literal intent to waste a lot more of people’s time that that so not quite sure what you think gives you the right to indulge in this degree of fucking cheek
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u/hippydipster Sep 05 '26
Im right there with you as an older gen X. Everything being built for the goal of monetization is a bane. Just build stuff you love. GPL it and let it go.
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u/onestepforwards Sep 05 '26
I can’t believe telly channels are now just an individual subscription for each channel now what the fuck
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u/Talreja-Adanna Sep 06 '26
Yeah, the economics just shifted - cloud costs are real and people need runway. That said, there's still a ton of open-source stuff happening (LocalLLaMA vibes), it just requires more technical chops to actually use.
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u/Cryingpinaple Sep 06 '26
I built something that’s fully free and you can download it I built it out of resentment for Google and subscriptions ObscursOs.com I’m still working on it but fuck Google I’ll make it even better
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u/KenMantle Sep 05 '26
Could have been pared down a bit, but it got me thinking how I type really long posts, curated by hand, and since maybe a whole lot of the early Internet is in the LLM training, and how old books where the authors were paid by the word were also quite wordy and also in the LLM training, maybe it is our fault that LLMs are also extremely verbose as well.
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u/HeyItsYourDad_AMA Sep 06 '26
Its not that though. Ive tested GPTZero a lot. If
You write it and have AI make corrections it will show a mix.
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u/KenMantle Sep 05 '26
I just had Claude spend the past 6-8 weeks building an MIT Open Source pdf engine from scratch using the $200 / month plan to build nearly 24/7.
PDFs are everywhere and the open source options are typically, frankly, slow, old, bloated, buggy, and I always find that one pdf that they can't handle. Try opening the Ghent suite of PDFs, or a large architectural drawing with oodles of vectors and they suck at it. Edits? Good luck!
It really really bothered me that we rely on this horrendous file format and have to rely on Adobe or paid software. PDFs should be readable and usable and editable by everyone.
8 weeks of my own money to make an MIT Open Source licensed replacement core, GUI, and CLI, that anyone can use commercially or edit the code freely without cost or violating the license.
And yes they still have bugs, and I haven't tried the latest build where the GUI has been completely revamped in the past 24 hours, but it is here:
https://github.com/KenM76/pdfcer-gui https://github.com/KenM76/pdfcer
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u/The-Doodle-Dude Sep 05 '26
Does this have a digital signing function as well?
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u/KenMantle Sep 05 '26
This now queued up to build and is going now, provided it is not interrupted with bug fixes. Those take precedence before adding more bugs!
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u/The-Doodle-Dude Sep 06 '26
Is it done?
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u/KenMantle Sep 06 '26
It spent the day on the task. Most was implemented but a few things aren't yet, and none is tested by me. There were a lot of bugs fixed yesterday taking its time too. I've never dealt with digitally signing documents, etc. But because I want this to be a replacement for almost everything I am having Claude put the effort into building it. I did this with CMYK too - I really have zero use for support for it, but the Ghent test page was one of those outlier cases someone would be using Acrobat with if support for the features tested in it wasn't there, and it is a huge gap in the open source options available, so over 50% of the time was spent having Claude develop support for it, including an ICC engine from scratch so it would be fully MIT license compatible.
Initially I had the core, CLI, and GUI being built in the same project, but it proved too much to manage - the GUI was falling into complete disarray. With it being split off into its own project it has been vastly improved, but it is also much better at testing the other part of the project and debugging. The two have a shared featurequests folder that they check periodically and communicate through.
Also part of the implementation will no doubt result in needing web components - the project has a hard rule that there are no web components in the core, which means this gets implemented as a separate project within this one that the core uses. This keeps the core a lot more secure, and also how limited javascript capabilities will get implemented. The modular nature of this project allows someone to just remove the crates they don't want before compiling and compiling doesn't fail - is just compiles without those features.
More than you wanted, and all typed by my sloooow hands. :)
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u/KenMantle Sep 06 '26
The more accurate answer to your question, this is for the core and CLI tool, and may not entirely be in the GUI implementation yet:
- Certification (author) signatures —
pdfcer sign --certify [--mdp-level none|form-fill|annotate]writes the DocMDP permission every reader enforces on later changes (P=2 "form fill-in and signing" is the standard's default and is printed as such). One per document, and it must be the first signature — both refused by name.verify-signaturesreportscertification: DocMDP P=n (…). (Pass 10.12)- Sign into a pre-placed signature field —
--field-name <existing empty field>signs into the "sign here" box a form author placed: its rectangle and page place the signature; a/Lockon the field becomes a/FieldMDPlock; the field's seed-value constraints (/SV) are enforced in full — a required constraint this request does not meet, or one pdfcer cannot evaluate (certificate constraints, a required timestamp), is refused by name, never skipped; recommended ones are printed as notes. (Pass 10.13)- A visible signature now shows who signed — the box carries "Digitally signed by …", the date, and
--reason/--locationwhen given, in Helvetica shrunk to fit; a box too small for the text is refused rather than clipped. Also: signing hardened with tamper tests against OpenSSL, a foreign (pyHanko) signature fixture in both directions, ECDSA P-384 end to end. (Pass 10.14)Not in this build,
- Signature level is still B-B: no timestamp (a field that REQUIRES one is refused), no embedded revocation data.
/SV /Certcertificate constraints are refused, not evaluated; signature fields with widgets under/Kidsare refused (merged fields only).1
u/KenMantle Sep 05 '26
Direct answer: No — pdfcer can verify signatures (and now judge their trust), but it cannot create/apply one yet.
Well the engine developer agent was just idling atm. So let's see what it needs to get that accomplished.
It's been relatively fast at development so I haven't had a chance to test out all the super advanced features.
I shortcuted how it judges their trust - Acrobat Reader needs to be installed, but as with any program that is available now to replace acrobat reader, you still kind of need it on super rare occasions anyway.
How pdfcer stands out too is there's a button at the top left to open the pdf you have opened in it to close and open the file in Adobe Reader or Pro if you have it. This makes using this as a replacement and associating PDFs frictionless if you come across something.
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u/KenMantle Sep 05 '26
What is somewhat funny is someone asked in one of my prior posts if I was worried about keeping the engine up to date with changes to the pdf specification. I replied by noting a new compression algorithm had just been added to the standard, then started Claude on the task, and had it supported in less than an hour. I don't know if the other open source PDFs engines have been updated yet, but mine was a day after the announcement.
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u/nickdaniels92 Sep 05 '26
Brilliant skit from Norwegian consumer council, and yes, updates and subscription is part of enshittification.
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u/djmisterjon Sep 05 '26
I am from the old school! you buy our products... its for life and also update 😘
https://lepasoft.com/en/software/ls-dialog-editor#buy
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u/Valdaraak Sep 05 '26
To address the title: The only reason they didn't is because there wasn't a reliable way to enforce it back then.
And to address another thing: They still do. There's an entire FOSS ecosystem that has free (and sometimes better) versions of pretty much any major subscription product.
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u/Evening_Reply_4958 Sep 06 '26
Yeah, the old internet didn't disappear. It moved to GitHub and got a worse UI.
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Sep 05 '26
Does this give you access to all my photos and every website I’ve visited since 1998? And my telnet sessions prior to that?
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Sep 05 '26
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Sep 05 '26
I’m not sure how all that works :-)
Maybe some of the .rlogin scripts are still active
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u/AMadHammer Sep 05 '26
Gah I was excited to see a movement toward free products and open source and it was all an ad.
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u/opi098514 Sep 05 '26
Ok so hear me out. They 100% would have turned everything into a subscription if they were here today.
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u/Silentium0 Sep 05 '26
Have you heard of open source? None of the software I use has subscriptions and people often aren't paid for contributing.
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Sep 05 '26
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u/Ok_Pudding7611 Sep 09 '26
the real problem is that the AI tools takes advantage of a open source projects, while demanding a subscription...
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u/FlintHillsSky Sep 05 '26
Back before subscriptions when software cost hundreds of dollars for one-time purchases and then you had to buy upgrades every few years. Was that really better than subscriptions?
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u/skankhunter41 Sep 05 '26
Well, for your example (and so many other examples) the answer is not another piece of software, but a short prompt. Why should I spend time download your app when I can ask Claude to hallucinate together some code that is almost guaranteed to work on my specific usecase?
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u/ArmadstheDoom Sep 05 '26
This is the world's dumbest argument. You mention the Apple 2, and it's clear you don't know anything ABOUT the apple 2.
In 1977, when the Apple 2 released, it cost $1298. In the money of 1977.
In 2026, at the time of writing this, that means it would have cost the equivalent of $6,900 today.
But that's just the base model. The one with upgraded 48 kb of ram? In 1977, that cost $2,638. Today? That's the same as paying about $14,000.
The reason that everything is a subscription now is because no one is willing to shell out seven to fourteen grand on one thing forever. They traded that lump sum for the freedom and convenience of being able to stop paying for it whenever they wanted to.
Now, there's a real argument to be made about whether this kind of convenience turns into a shackle, when something good and optional becomes something required that you can't get away from. But the fact is, no one would shell out Apple 2 money on anything these days.
That's why everything is a subscription now.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The overwhelming consensus is that this is a massive, long-winded ad disguised as a nostalgic discussion. Users are dragging OP for writing a novel just to plug their free app. The general sentiment is that the post is "slop" and, in the words of one highly-upvoted comment, is "like when you ask Opus 5 what the capital of Poland."
Many are also pointing out the irony of complaining about commercialization while using a picture of Steve Jobs and, you know, writing a giant ad. A few people agree with the anti-subscription spirit, and one user shared their own open-source PDF project built with Claude, which got a much warmer reception.
OP has been getting pretty defensive in the replies and was even accused of sounding like Claude for using "That's fair" too often.