In 2020, Robin Sloan shared his experience with BoopSnoop, a messaging app he developed for his family, and considered it a success that only four people downloaded it. He argued that an app can be like a home-cooked meal: it doesn’t need to have a large scale or many users, what matters is serving the people you love.
Sloan mentioned that in an ideal world, he would have created the app in a day, using a modern and flexible tool like HyperCard for iOS. Six years later, the essay resurfaces on X, where Thariq states that ‘personal software’ was a bit ahead of its time in 2020, but in 2026, it really can be as personal as a home-cooked meal or a handwritten letter. Lee Robinson also wrote about this shift, arguing that AI has made ‘personal computing’ truly personal, and he and his wife developed a baby tracker without the need for user profiles, badges, subscription tiers, or any other extra features.
In this context, the author of the article invested six months building highly personalized software, such as a sleep app that runs our sleep consultant’s plan, a fitness app that scales my base vitamin based on morning run performance, and a ‘Duolingo for jazz’ that tests me on chord shapes from my piano lessons. These apps were built quickly, showing that imagination is now the limiting factor, and maintenance has proven surprisingly easy.
The cost of building these apps is significant, with a total spend of about $160 per month, mainly on the Claude Code Max subscription. However, most of this cost is not directly related to personal apps, but to larger projects like nycjazz.guide and Claude Code Daily. The gum that most of these services have generous free tiers, it’s possible to keep the cost at an agentic coding subscription of about $20 per month and API usage of approximately $5 to $10 per month.
Looking to the future, the current approach is still too technical for most people, but it’s believed this will change soon. With the evolution of tools, creating personal software will no longer require a developer stack. The frustration of not finding apps that truly know the user’s context is common, and it’s believed that once the barrier drops enough, many people will build their own apps.
Once you use an app that truly knows your context, the generic version feels broken. It wouldn’t be surprising if true personalization becomes the new standard consumer expectation.