If building software gets cheap for everyone, what happens to software-only startups?

#Entrepreneurship #Startups #Technology

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Software-only stays investable when distribution, trust, or data is the real moat — code is no longer the barrier.
Capital will drift toward hardware, regulated industries, and physical products that can generate software as a side effect.
Margins compress everywhere; winners are brands, compliance, and customer lock-in, not repos.
Every company becomes a software company anyway, so the label stops meaning anything useful.
We will see a wave of thin clones until users fatigue; then depth and taste matter again.
Open source plus AI makes pure wrappers fragile — you need a workflow people cannot swap in a weekend.
Investors will fund teams that own a painful vertical end-to-end, not another horizontal tool.
Cheap building helps solo founders most; institutions still move slowly for political reasons.
The startup is not the app anymore — it is the audience, community, or protocol around it.
I am skeptical: cheap generation does not include maintenance, security, or support.