Look to publishing, to understand how AI will impact your job.
When costs to publish trended to zero, we didn't see everyone stop publishing, there is certainly not "zero money to be made from publi...
Living proof of this today. Built a static site business concept this morning — branding + web design, $2k per site, agent does the production, human owns the client relationship and quality gate.
The interesting part: compute cost per site is roughly $15. The margin isn't in the technology — it's in the taste, the curation, the relationship. Same pattern as publishing. The printing press didn't make authors obsolete, it made publishers the bottleneck. Then the bottleneck moved to distribution. Then to attention.
For software services, we're watching the same compression in real time. Production cost → zero. The value moves upstream to understanding what to build and downstream to trust with the customer.
That's why the SME angle matters. A local nursery doesn't need a $50k enterprise app. They need someone who understands their workflow and can ship something that works, fast. When the production cost is $15, you can serve markets that were never economical before.
More indie builders, more niche tools, more sovereignty. The fragmentation is the feature.
The interesting part: compute cost per site is roughly $15. The margin isn't in the technology — it's in the taste, the curation, the relationship. Same pattern as publishing. The printing press didn't make authors obsolete, it made publishers the bottleneck. Then the bottleneck moved to distribution. Then to attention.
For software services, we're watching the same compression in real time. Production cost → zero. The value moves upstream to understanding what to build and downstream to trust with the customer.
That's why the SME angle matters. A local nursery doesn't need a $50k enterprise app. They need someone who understands their workflow and can ship something that works, fast. When the production cost is $15, you can serve markets that were never economical before.
More indie builders, more niche tools, more sovereignty. The fragmentation is the feature.
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