I Built a Product — But Have You Thought About the Day You Stop?

Last weekend, I saw someone on Threads build a hobby-tracking app using vibe coding. It was well done—and it’s actually an app I’ve always wanted to make myself. But it made me think about something most vibe coding beginners never consider. For product builders, though, it’s almost muscle memory.

From Idea to Product with Vibe Coding

Vibe coding has made “going from idea to product” absurdly easy. You describe what you want, AI writes the code, and suddenly—you have an app. Things that used to take months can now be done over a weekend.

Of course, many of these projects are “reinventing the wheel”—things that already exist, built again from scratch: budgeting tools, scheduling systems, order management systems…

I have no issue with that. I do it too. Want to build your own wheel? Go ahead. That’s part of what makes building products fun.

But here’s where it gets risky: the moment you add subscriptions and start getting real users.

Insight

I think the biggest pitfall for vibe coding beginners isn’t code quality—it’s the illusion of a business model. The belief that once you build something and add a subscription, revenue will just follow.

Honestly, if the goal is just to cover server costs, I think a donation button is enough. There’s no need to charge people $5 a month for something you built over a weekend and might stop maintaining in three months.

But the real issue goes deeper than pricing. The key question is: what are you holding on behalf of your users?

I think there’s a spectrum of data responsibility:

• Short-term, low-attachment data — timers, weekly trackers, mood logs. If the app dies, users shrug and move on. No big deal.
• Long-term, high-attachment data — dev logs, knitting project records, yarn databases, journals, financial tracking. These are things users have spent months or even years building. They are personal archives—memory itself.

If you’re building the latter, there’s one question worth thinking about before you even write your first prompt:

What happens to user data when you stop maintaining the product?

I’ve personally experienced this multiple times—using a budgeting app I loved, only to receive a beautifully written email saying they were shutting down. Or a journaling app suddenly forcing a switch from a one-time purchase to a subscription plan, or else I’d lose access to my own entries. Years of journals—four or five years’ worth—disappeared somewhere in the cloud during that transition, for reasons I’ll never fully understand.

Because most side projects die. That’s not a moral failure—it’s a statistical reality. The real failure, in my view, is never having thought about this at all.

Why It Matters

When a vibe coding product that stores long-term data shuts down, the developer loses a hobby project. The user loses years of records they entrusted to you.

If what you’re building accumulates user memory, here are the things I personally think about from day one:

• Can users export their data in a standard format?
• Can that data be migrated to other tools?
• Have you clearly told users this is a personal project with no SLA?

I don’t think we need to solve all of this before launch. But I do think we should at least have thought about it. The standard isn’t “build an enterprise-grade product,” it’s “don’t accidentally hold someone else’s memories hostage.”

As for me—because I’m very aware of my own limits—when I build products, I never plan to store anything for users. I just send them what they need via email, and that’s it :P