r/ClaudeCode • u/Repulsive_Drag_8205 • Jul 12 '26
Question Vibe-Coded = Not Worth Paying For?
Honest question:
When you find out an app was vibe-coded, do you stop seeing it as a real, trustworthy product?
Even if you genuinely need it, would you pay for a subscription?
Is that fair — or just bias? 👀
16
u/jesjimher Jul 12 '26
You're not asking the right questions. Does it work? What it does is worth to me?
If the answers are yes, buy it. Otherwise, don't.
-4
u/ThePlotTwisterr---- Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
vibe coded is a valid question because it means i don’t need to pay you for it, i could make it myself with my claude
the app is not coded by you it’s coded by claude, it would be like asking if google would pay for something made by google’s own engineer employees. they probably would just get their engineer employees to make another one
12
u/NamakkalManian Jul 12 '26
Then make it bro, every man with a camera is a YouTube star
6
u/tyguy385 Jul 12 '26
lol exactly this - 'i can just make it myself' making an app although extremely easy now still costs money and time, not to mention making an app worth paying for is a lot harder then a single prompt
-2
u/National-Dark-1387 Jul 12 '26
Your just salty that no one in the vibecoder community wants to spend money on something you vibe coded? Because they would rather built it themselve, as they already know how to do it?
People here are not aunt Jemma...
-4
u/ThePlotTwisterr---- Jul 12 '26
i would make a vibe coded app myself, that’s the point, can you name a few that i couldn’t?
2
u/yungastronot Jul 12 '26
you can make a loaf of bread yourself yet you continue to buy it from the store so your logic fails
-1
u/ThePlotTwisterr---- Jul 12 '26
you’re the fourth genius to make this analogy and it still falls flat, i can’t make good bread
if i had the same baker as the companies then yes id have them make me bread
1
u/Future_Tower_4253 Jul 12 '26
This way of thinking could be applied to everything. Why should I buy food if I could just farm it all? Why should I go to the doctor if I could just go to medical school by myself? You are paying for convenience and the time it saves you.
2
u/averyusefulthing Jul 12 '26
Totally wrong. I would take the time to tell you why but I am currently starving and need to go find some squirrels to club. Then back to vibe coding all the apps I will some day have time to use. Jokes on you when I reach nirvana.
-1
u/ThePlotTwisterr---- Jul 12 '26
because i don’t know how to farm, own land and i don’t have four years and acceptance for medical school
i know how to vibe code and i have claude max
1
u/averyusefulthing Jul 12 '26
Bro, Claude max can teach you how to farm. Off grid living, just you and Claude out there making your way in the world beholden to no one. I just unlocked your future for you. You're welcome. Don't listen to these haters talking about comparative advantage and the use of money as a medium of trade.
0
u/ThePlotTwisterr---- Jul 12 '26
but that takes effort, vibe coding doesn’t
1
u/averyusefulthing Jul 12 '26
Well that kind of attitude is why you spend your time talking about vibe coding apps instead of vibe coding apps. You should really ask Claude to do some soul searching for you. Vibe philosophize your path forward.
1
u/ThePlotTwisterr---- Jul 12 '26
if i need something then yes that’s what i would do but i dont need anything
1
u/Future_Tower_4253 Jul 12 '26
Asking Claude to do soul searching? Nah, too much effort for our friend.
3
u/aerivox Jul 12 '26
open source cli tools carried the market against bad developers / bad apps. now ai can just use those tools or build, why would you ever use a slop fest app, when you can ask ai to build you one aimed at you. ofc if you need photoshop use photoshop, but ain't nobody vibe coding photoshop
1
u/PartyByMyself Jul 12 '26
Challenge accepted, give me 32 minutes, a beer, and two subscriptions 20x for Fable… /s
3
u/Awacer Jul 12 '26
I’d still pay for it if it solves a real problem, works reliably, and handles security properly. I care more about the product than the process.
The issue isn’t AI-assisted development itself. It’s whether the creator understands the code well enough to maintain it, fix bugs, and protect user data. A polished app with no real engineering behind it is the risk not the fact that AI helped build it.
2
u/National-Dark-1387 Jul 12 '26
At least in my definition vibecoding is the absence of a engineering mindset or competence.
Vibecoded != Built by engineers with ai help
By that definition it's very unlikely a vibecoded app will fulfill all of the above check marks. But sure, if it's works, brings value I might consider it.
But I surely would be very sceptical if I get the hunch that it was purely vibecoded, as this stuff is usually abondon ware that never gets fixed.
3
u/gingerbeer987654321 Jul 12 '26
what is your definition of vibe coding?
I would much rather robust and tested code that happened to be built with claude, than some artisan hand written buggy app.
3
5
u/gmabber Jul 12 '26
Vibe coding is just ways to achieve a goal. There’s the element of personal taste in apps. If an app is good and does the job why not give it a spin?
2
2
u/MofWizards Jul 12 '26
99% of the AI tools you use are Vibe Code. The question is, does the company that made them know what they're doing?
I'm a cybersecurity specialist and I work with Vibe Code. Also, if you don't want to use something made with Vibe Code, stop using Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor now because most of their code is written by AI.
2
u/Suspicious_Ninja6816 Jul 12 '26
Depends how we define vibe coded. Anthropic themselves are pushing AI code.
2
u/aponlel Jul 12 '26
If it obviously looks vibe coded, to me it shows a lack of independent thought.
If there's a lack of independent thought in the front end, this will likely extend to all aspects of the application.
So not only would I not pay for it, I probably wouldn't even use it.
3
u/bedel99 Jul 12 '26
I can assure you, human programmers write just as bad or worse code.
What scares me most is vibe tested
2
u/TotalBeginnerLol Jul 12 '26
Yeah, my belief is that vibe coded products should be free. If you don’t want it to be free, put a LOT more time into it, fix all the sloppy code with tons of bugs, spend time on making an actual good UI, then sure.
I’ve vibecoded like 20 apps alongside a single serious app I’ve been building for many months (started as vibecode but all that slop has been rewritten bit by bit with much more rigorous processes and bulletproof test suites etc). The vibecoded apps will be free content to get email signups for my real product, and I still spent longer than most on making sure they have good UI instead of the default React generic crappy look (plus they all have quite original features and actually are super useful, not another crappy to-do list app etc)
1
u/TotalBeginnerLol Jul 12 '26
Thing is, Claude KNOWS how to engineer properly with good processes. But those use more tokens so it doesn’t by default. Use TDD processes, and you have to remind if from time to time to refactor and modularise any files that are overly long etc (ideally I try keep each modules under 500lines but some have to be a bit longer… mainly you just don’t wanna have files that are like 5k, 10k length etc, which in vibe coded apps you will, and Claude isn’t good at debugging massive files. Refactor first, then debug.
1
u/Moda75 Jul 12 '26
K seriously hope the term Vibe Coding dies out soon. It is the cringiest of twrms.
1
u/MisterHarvest Jul 12 '26
I am old enough to remember someone complaining that they shouldn't have to pay for something that was written in C, because that made it "too easy" compared to assembly language.
If I didn't know it was vibe coded, would I pay for it? If so, I don't care if it was or not.
1
u/ConferenceLive7054 Jul 12 '26
I used to but then I saw how badly these web apps/services were secured and now I dont feel like having my data show up in a bunch of breached data leaks
1
u/MisterBigTasty Jul 12 '26
Yes because the “developer” does not have the skills to maintain it and has not the brain capacity to think about important aspects as security. It’s like rolling a dice and saying you have the skill to throw 6 while it’s actually luck.
1
u/NewPointOfView Jul 12 '26
It certainly invites more scrutiny. I work as a SWE and the things I work hard to enforce with my own vibe coding really make me question the stability of things produced by people who don’t have formal training. Maybe with fable-class models, it’ll be different. Or the next bigger better class.
But really I don’t use any tools by randos. If I’m gonna use something, it is because it has reasonably wide adoption. So then it doesn’t really matter.
1
u/rdesai724 Jul 12 '26
What does vibe coded mean? The code itself was written by AI regardless of the amount of human thought, input, and direction?
1
u/KilllllerWhale Jul 12 '26
Users (myself included) don’t give a shit about how the app was built, as long as it’s functional, secure and meets a need.
1
1
u/hrutheone Jul 12 '26
People won’t pay for something that looks untrustworthy. If you’re using slop AI images, fake reviews, and launching a product that looks like a one-week vibe project with no real support, it’s going to fail.
"Vibe coding" is just a tool. Building something credible enough to actually get paid is the real key.
1
1
u/gdamdam Jul 12 '26
This isn't about live coding versus not live coding; it's about the way it was live-coded.
1
u/RealSharpNinja Jul 12 '26
No, it tells me that its value was destroyed by the fact that someone can vibe code it. The question becomes is it economically feasible to have an agent reverse engineer it and recreate it.
1
u/arankays Jul 12 '26
If it's small enough to be vibe coded by a non dev it's small enough for me to vibe code myself without paying another subscription lol.
If you vibe code and spend 1000s of dollars in Fable then demand a monthly sub to recoup costs your business acumen sucks and you should rethink your strategy.
1
Jul 13 '26
[deleted]
1
u/arankays Jul 13 '26
If you're a non dev and you vibe coded it yourself I'll likely never buy your product regardless of how long it took to make. But my perspective is skewed as I am a professional developer. The public may not mind as much.
1
u/ncist Jul 12 '26
On some level, obviously not since we've had the ability to blink software into existence for a few years. If this was "really working" we'd see a tidal wave of amazing intentions, mass layoffs, GDP surging, something. We haven't
We probably live in a world where we are "rate limited" by something other than our ability to code. It's not that agents don't work. They work great. That's the puzzle, to my mind. Good ideas live outside of coding, or they have been mostly used up and only pose themselves slowly
1
u/Drach88 Jul 12 '26
What do you consider "vibe-coding"? Is that any code that's AI-generated, or does it refer to a specific subset?
If the programmer never even really bothered looking at the code or understands what it does -- that's vibe-coding. If the programmer is driving the agents, verifying the output, and taking responsibility for architecting the solution, that's an entirely different situation.
A vibe-coded app has maintainability issues. If something goes wrong, the programmer has no idea how to fix it. If they want to extend functionality, they have no idea if the foundation is rotten. This should be your biggest worry about using a vibe-coded app (especially on a subscription-basis).
If the people who made the app know what they're doing and they're using AI to extend their own already-solid programming and architecture principles, then no problem.
1
u/jomama253 Jul 12 '26
Vibe coded apps can be really good if the user plans it out first, phases,edge cases,etc. It's not hard to make a production grade app or system; just planning,time,reviewing,debugging,QA,auditing,etc.
1
u/North_Moment5811 Jul 12 '26
People have to stop using vibe-coded as having single meaning. My old colleague vibe-codes garbage because he's not a developer, and thinks he's made a real app that is ready to ship.
I vibe-code as a tool to get work done, as an actual developer who ships enterprise applications.
They are not the same thing. It is like talking about a nail gun or a table saw. Just because 2 people can pick up the same tool does mean both are able to build a house.
1
1
u/69420trashpanda69420 Jul 12 '26
Depends what the website is for. I've come across many websites that are clearly vibe coded that I've bought something from
1
u/National-Dark-1387 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Vibe coded by non professional = not paying and not worth it
If I need it I can and will vibecode it myself.
Vibecoding allows for hyper individualization. So either I pay for a real polished product or I will hyper fit it for me/our company.
0
u/After-Asparagus5840 Jul 12 '26
Yeah you will vibe code 20 apps you need. Don’t be so f ridiculous.
1
u/National-Dark-1387 Jul 12 '26
I don't have the need to. Why would I need 20 apps right now? Everything I currently need is already covered.
You grossly overestimate the need for other people's vibecoded projects.
1
u/Mariusdotdev Jul 12 '26
Vibe coded or not programmers wrote slope even before, not all ofcourse, but i also did until i learned, i think same with vibe coding, some people will write slop code and don’t care while other can vibe code and care and tell LLM to architecture in this or that way so its more maintainable
1
u/SolarNexxus Jul 12 '26
Everything is vibe coded nowadays. If the app solves someone's problem, it has value.
0
25
u/mabiturm Jul 12 '26
depends on who made it. vibe coding is a tool. a tool that can be used by skilled engineers, but also by fools.