The Rise of Hyper Local Software
For years, we’ve been told that software is eating the world. Big, cloud-hosted platforms — Salesforce, Notion, Slack, Jira, Airtable — working to solve every problem for every team, at any scale. And mostly, they delivered. SaaS transformed how businesses work.
Making software and systems that support millions of people, with a variety of needs and requirements isn’t easy. Software adds complexity to deal with the hundreds use cases. It becomes a series of compromises. Software that starts small and well focused, evolves into a villain, despised by users.
Now something is shifting and not enough people are talking about it.
The “SaaS Is Dead” Take Is Half Right
There’s no shortage of hot takes about AI agents killing SaaS. The argument goes: why pay for Salesforce when an AI agent can just build your CRM for you? Why subscribe to a project management tool when an agent can manage your projects? Satya Nadella has suggested that business applications are essentially just “CRUD databases with business logic” that will eventually collapse into the AI layer.
That’s a plausible long-term story for enterprise software, but it’s not the most interesting thing happening right now.
The more interesting story is quieter and more personal. Agentic coding tools are making it trivially fast for individuals and small teams to build software tailored to their situation. Not enterprise replacements. Not startups. Just… tools that fit their needs.
I don’t know if this has a name yet, but I’ve started calling it hyper-local software: apps built for an audience that might be one person, one team, or one community. Apps that would never survive as a SaaS business because the market is too small or too specific, but that are useful to the people they’re built for.
Why Now
The economics of building software have changed. The friction of creation has dropped to the point where it now competes with the friction of discovery. It used to be that if you had a niche software need, you’d spend hours searching for a tool that mostly fit, pay for it, and accept its limitations. Now, in many cases, it’s faster to just build what you actually want.
Hyper-local software doesn’t have the same scale and quality requirements of enterprise SaaS software. When it’s software built for one, or a team, you’re willing to live with papercuts — or fix them as needed. You don’t need to handle scale for millions of users.
The result is a new kind of software culture emerging. Not SaaS. Not open source in the traditional sense. Something more like the early days of the web, when people built things because they wanted them and shared them because sharing was easy.
The Opportunity
Is anyone thinking about how to support this ecosystem?
The conversation around AI and software is dominated by the enterprise angle, which SaaS companies will survive, which will be disrupted, how incumbents should respond. That’s a legitimate conversation, but it ignores an entirely different opportunity.
What would it look like to deliberately cultivate a hyper-local software culture?
The ingredients seem clear enough:
Low-friction creation. The tools are largely here — agentic coding has dramatically lowered the barrier. But they’re still oriented toward professional developers. There’s room for tooling that’s oriented toward domain experts who want to build something that works for their specific context.
Easy sharing and remixing. The most valuable thing about hyper-local apps isn’t just that one person can build one — it’s that patterns can spread. If a teacher builds a great gradebook app for her specific situation, there’s likely another teacher in a slightly different situation who could build on that work. A culture of remixing is essential.
Community around use cases. The social layer matters enormously. When people share what they’ve built, not as products but as solutions to specific problems, it creates a library of starting points. It normalizes the idea of building your own tools. It creates the kind of culture where “I just built something for that” is a normal thing to say.
Graceful hosting. The infrastructure needs to be low-maintenance enough that a non-engineer can deploy and keep running a small personal app without it becoming a second job.
This isn’t a product pitch. It’s a gap observation. The culture of hyper-local software is forming on its own in blog posts, in indie developer communities, in the growing practice of vibe coding. But it’s diffuse and unsupported.
Has anyone thought about giving this ecosystem a home? Maybe I’m not paying close enough attention.
Glitch Was Almost That Home
It’s hard for me to think about this gap without thinking about Glitch.
Glitch launched in 2017 with a simple and radical idea: what if building and sharing a web app was as easy as publishing a blog post? You could create a project, remix someone else’s, deploy instantly, and share with a link. The community that formed around it was warm, creative, and genuinely collaborative. By 2019, the platform hosted over 2.5 million apps. Sadly, in 2025, Glitch shut down project hosting. The architecture had grown expensive to maintain. Abuse had driven up operational costs. The developer landscape had evolved around it.
Looking back, Glitch had most of the right ingredients. Easy creation. One-click remixing. Starter projects that let you go from zero to something real in minutes. A community that celebrated building things, not just shipping products. An ethos1 of sharing that felt more like a craft community than a startup ecosystem.
Glitch was, in spirit, exactly the kind of place where hyper-local software culture could have flourished. Maybe my own bias is showing.
The best software has always been the kind that fits. The era of hyper-local apps is making that possible for almost anyone. The question is whether we’ll build the ecosystem to support it.
1: Claude helped me with finding the right word