The numbers
996 paid apps, gone through one by one. Here is what they say together — and what these numbers do not say.
How many can be rebuilt
- YES 153 15% · one session, and a personal version you can actually use Vedile tutte
- KIND OF 451 45% · buildable in a weekend, but real gaps stay open Vedile tutte
- NOT REALLY 392 39% · the value is the network, the data or the infrastructure Vedile tutte
What subscribing to everything costs
18,827 $ /month
It is the sum of the monthly prices of the 700 apps whose price reduces to a number — 70% of the total. In dollars, because that is the currency the dataset normalises prices to.
It is not what anyone pays: nobody holds all these subscriptions at once, annual discounts are not counted, and the 296 usage-based or quote-only apps stay out of the sum instead of entering it as zero. It is an order of magnitude for how much subscription software sits, today, one prompt away.
The most crowded categories
What defends the apps that survive
Every app carries one to three moats, so these numbers add up to more than 996: they are not slices of a pie.
- Execution quality 549
- Infrastructure scale 444
- Integrations 397
- Collaboration 172
- Proprietary models 126
- Proprietary data 113
- Content and rights 107
- Compliance and regulation 102
- Network effects 81
- Brand and trust 75
- Switching costs 40
- Hardware 7
- Marketplace liquidity 6