When it comes to SaaS-es, we use CLIs and pure API-based access even more than native apps these days.
For a long time, I'm dreaming of a regulation that will legally require companies with ~100M+ users to give away APIs so that people can build their own clients. Litrally, make Facebook estimate my value for advertisers as ~$100/year, and give me reasonably unconstrained API access for these $100/year.
If Meta says I'm worth $10K a year to advertisers, well, let's talk — that's what Congress hearings and the Attorney General are for. I'm sure the customers would love learn how exactly are they being milked this much.
If Meta says I'm worth $10 a year, well, even better for me.
And then there's an open market for "third-party" clients. Which the very Meta-build Facebook App competes with, freely.
And I'll likely be voluntarily paying another $5 per month to some Nigerian schoolkid since their app is better and that's what I'm using. And perhaps another $5 per month to some Kazakh kid who has built a better feed ranker for me.
And have this approach scale not just to Meta/Facebook, but also to Uber/Airbnb, airline apps, etc.
Well, not going to happen. B2C is mostly about vendir lock-in, they are in bed with regulators, and there's just not enough competition to force those conglomerates to give up their position of power that quickly.
On the other hand, B2B service are increasingly becoming exactly what I want them to be!
Github — I mostly use it from my agents. YouTrack, because that's what we use — agent-first usage. Slack and email and calendar — MCP and here we go.
In fact, for YouTrack I even have my agents use it via the API, not the CLI. The annoying CLI always tries to make me unlock my keychain, making MacOS more like Windows — annoying af with those pop-ups. But via the API, with the key in an
.env file of that one repo I open with Cursor to triage tasks — fantastic.Not sure there is a deep moral to this post. My personal life is still about B2C apps, and whatever I can't stand in, say, Google Maps or in Facebook — that's unlikely to change any time soon.
But that B2B services are increasingly API-first and agent-native gives me hope. Because those products are much more fun for me to build. And their impact on our civilization may well be much higher, since agent-native usage is starting to overtake human-first usage as we speak.
(If only we could fix banking and taxes and international travel and visas and airport document checks same way, with APIs and agents and strong contracts. What a world that would be. Well, a man can dream.)