Software as a Consumable: The category that shouldn't exist (but does)
What happens when you no longer have to maintain software?
Imagine someone in 1995 saying:
“In the future, anyone will instantly summon a stranger to move furniture for pocket change.”
They’d be laughed out of the room. The economics don’t work. The logistics are impossible. The trust mechanisms don’t exist.
But here we are. Taskrabbit exists.
It didn’t destroy professional movers. It created an entirely new category of casual, personal tasks that were never worth doing before.
The same impossible shift is happening with software right now.
When costs collapse
Something magical happens when the cost of something drops below a critical threshold:
Photography: Digital cameras made photos free, so instead of 24 carefully composed vacation shots, people take 500 photos at brunch.
Transportation: Uber made rides cheap enough that people take them for 6 blocks.
Food delivery: Apps made it cheap enough to order a single coffee.
The pattern: When costs collapse, we don’t just do the same things cheaper. We do entirely new things that weren’t worth doing before.
💻 The $3,000 barrier
For 50 years, software had a fundamental constraint: you needed someone who could write code.
The math:
Engineer salary: $150K/year
Minimum viable tool: ~1 week
Cost per utility: ~$3,000
Software only got built if it solved a problem for many people, justified significant ROI, or someone cared enough to learn programming themselves.
Everything else? People suffered through it.
That spreadsheet you manually update every Monday. That report you copy-paste between 5 systems. That data transformation you do by hand.
We accepted that some problems were “too small” for software.
The economics broke
Creating software used to cost:
$3,000 minimum
Years of training
Deep technical knowledge
Creating software now costs:
$0.50 (Claude API call)
30 seconds of description
Ability to describe a problem in English
That’s a 6,000x improvement.
When something gets 6,000x cheaper, you don’t just do it more. You unlock entirely new categories of use.
Consumable software
There’s now a category of software that:
Disposable - Used once, then forgotten
Ephemeral - Might not exist tomorrow
Personal - Solves a problem for one person
Regenerable - Easier to recreate than maintain
Quick - Generated in seconds
This category was economically impossible for 50 years. Now it’s common.
Real examples from last month:
A marketer generated a tool to extract social media links from pages. Used it twice. Forgot about it. Would regenerate if needed again.
A recruiter generated a script to clean LinkedIn CSV exports. Used it for one campaign. Never thought about it again.
A PM generated a tool to combine 3 Notion databases. Used it for one report. Doesn’t remember where it is. Doesn’t care.
None of them know how to code. None maintained their code. None even saved it. And that’s completely rational.
Two categories of software
Software as a Product (still needs engineers):
Used by thousands/millions
Maintained over years
Quality matters deeply
Revenue model
Examples: Figma, Notion, banking apps
Software as a Consumable (anyone can make):
Used by one person
Exists for minutes/days
Quality barely matters
No revenue, just utility
Examples: “Combine these CSVs,” “Extract emails from this text,” “Convert this format to that format”
The first category didn’t change. It still needs engineers. The second category didn’t exist before. Now it does. This isn’t about engineers writing worse code. It’s about non-engineers creating software for the first time.
The coming flood
What happens when 8 billion people can suddenly create software?
When everyone got cameras: Didn’t destroy professional photography. Created billions of personal photos. Instagram emerged.
When everyone got video cameras: Didn’t destroy Hollywood. Created billions of personal videos. TikTok emerged.
When everyone got publishing platforms: Didn’t destroy journalism. Created billions of blog posts. Medium emerged.
Now everyone can create software: Won’t destroy engineering. Will create billions of personal utilities. The platform hasn’t emerged yet.
Just like Instagram couldn’t exist before casual photography was possible, we don’t yet know what will emerge when casual software creation becomes normal.
Problems worth solving
Remember all those “too small” problems?
Sarah (HR): “Cross-reference employee emails with benefits enrollment.”
Before: 2 hours of manual Excel work, monthly
Now: “Claude, find emails in A but not B.” 30 seconds.
Marcus (small business): “Generate invoices from my spreadsheet.”
Before: Hire developer ($500-1000) or manual torture
Now: Describe the format. 1 minute.
Jen (analyst): “Extract URLs from 50 PDFs and check if they work.”
Before: Impossible without technical help
Now: 2 minutes.
These aren’t products. They’re personal utilities that solve a problem once and cease to matter. They’re consumable.
Regeneration vs maintenance
Traditional software lifecycle:
Write code
Document it
Maintain for years
Fix bugs
Refactor
Live with technical debt
Consumable software lifecycle:
Generate it
Use it
Forget it
Regenerate if ever needed again
When generation is faster than maintenance, maintenance becomes irrational. This is backwards from 50 years of software wisdom. And that’s okay – this is a different category.
The quality is irrelevant (for consumables)
For consumable software, quality barely matters.
Doesn’t need to: scale to millions, be maintainable, be documented, follow best practices, be elegant, be particularly secure or performant
Does need to: work right now, solve this specific problem
That’s it.
This drives engineers crazy. We’ve been trained that quality matters. And it does – for products.
But consumable software is like a paper towel. Single-use, disposable, solves an immediate problem. Insisting every paper towel be archival-quality museum-grade paper would be insane. Yet that’s what we did with software for 50 years – because we had no choice.
What this means for engineers
The good news: Your job isn’t going away.
The great news: Your job is getting better.
Before: 40% of engineer time building throwaway utilities for other teams
After: 5% of time on utilities (everyone generates their own). Focus on products, core infrastructure, complex systems.
Engineers are being freed from the “too small for a product, too technical for normal people” zone. That zone is becoming accessible to everyone. That’s liberating, not threatening.
The Neople perspective
People using Nora (our AI colleague) increasingly generate little tools for themselves: data transformations, workflow automation, quick reports.
They don’t call them “software.” They think of them as “getting the task done.”
But that’s what they are: disposable, personal software.
The shift we’re enabling isn’t “better software engineering.” It’s “software creation for everyone.”
The platform that didn’t exist yet
Instagram couldn’t exist before smartphone cameras. YouTube couldn’t exist before accessible video. Twitter couldn’t exist before everyone could publish text.
So what platform will exist when everyone can generate software?
Maybe a marketplace for prompts instead of code. A system for sharing and remixing generated tools. A web where everyone can customize everything. Something we can’t imagine yet.
We’re at the “everyone has a camera phone” moment for software.
The Instagram moment is still coming.
The shift is starting
We’re at the very beginning:
Today: Non-technical people generating tools. People regenerating instead of maintaining. Prompts being saved instead of code. Software treated as disposable.
In 12-18 months: Billions of pieces of consumable software. Platforms emerging to share and remix. Software creation as common as document creation. Engineers focused entirely on products.
For 50 years, software was scarce because creation was expensive. For the next 50 years, software will be abundant because creation is free.
Everything changes.
Full circle
Taskrabbit didn’t make professional movers obsolete. It created a category that shouldn’t exist: “casual, personal furniture moving.”
Before Taskrabbit, you either did it yourself or hired professional movers for thousands of dollars. No in-between. The economics didn’t work.
Now there’s an in-between. And it’s massive.
Consumable software is the same: too small for a product, too personal for enterprise, too cheap to justify professional development.
But now it exists. And it’s being created by everyone, not just engineers.
Software is becoming a consumable. Not because professional software is dying. But because a whole new category of personal, disposable, regenerable software is being born.
Watching the birth of consumable software at neople.io. Where anyone can generate the tools they need, use them once, and move on with their life.
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