Business people keep telling me software is cheap now. They say it like it settles something. As if the cost of building were the whole story, and the rest is just admin.
It usually comes from the people overseeing the work, not the ones shipping it. And the claim quietly swaps two things that aren't the same.
Cheap to build is one thing. Worth owning or doing is another.
They feel like they should travel together. If a thing is easy to make, surely it's easy to have something good. But the price of building and the value of owning have never moved in step, and right now they're pulling apart fast.
A founder can build over a weekend what once took a team and half a year. The barrier that used to keep most people out is mostly gone. Building is close to free.
Here is what that does. When something becomes free, it stops being an advantage and becomes table stakes. Everyone has it. The thing everyone has is, by definition, not the thing worth owning.
So what is? The same things that always were, except now they're the only things left. An audience that hears you when you speak. A reputation that sells before you arrive. A real understanding of a customer's problem, the kind you can't prompt your way to. Trust, slow to earn and quick to lose.
None of these got cheaper. They got dearer, because the world filled up with cheap software and the scarce thing became the will to care about any particular piece of it.
The build was always the easy half. We just couldn't see it while building was hard, because the difficulty hid the truth. Remove the effort, and you find out whether there was ever anything underneath. Often there isn't.
A weekend project with no audience is a weekend project. A clever AI wrapper with no distribution is a feature waiting to be absorbed by whoever already has the customers. You owned the code. The code was the cheap part. You didn't own the demand or the trust or the place in someone's life, and those were never in the repo.
The test is simple. If a hundred people could build the same thing this weekend – and now they can – the thing isn't the asset. The asset is whatever stops them mattering when they do. That's almost never the software.
So when someone tells me software is cheap now, I agree. It is. It just doesn't change what's worth having. It changes what's worth doing with your time.
Build the thing. It's never been easier and that's a gift. But don't confuse the ease of building with the worth of what you've built. The market won't.
You can own a great deal of software now for almost nothing.
Owning something that matters still costs what it always did.
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