I wrote recently about what Wall Street gets wrong about SaaS—how the $285 billion selloff confuses capability with full-throated DIY. Mission-critical enterprise software isn’t going anywhere. But I also argued that micro-apps are a different story. Small, personal utilities that solve one person’s problem? Those are absolutely getting built by non-developers now.

Anton Sten is a good example. A designer, not a developer, who rebuilt his website with Cursor and Claude last year and then turned his attention to replacing the $11/month invoicing tool he’d been paying for. The initial version followed familiar SaaS patterns. Then something clicked:

I was building software that lived by old rules. Rules designed for generic tools that serve thousands of users. But this tool serves exactly one user. Me.

So I changed it. Now, instead of manually entering client details, I upload a signed contract and let AI parse it — mapping it to an existing client or creating a new one, extracting the scope, payment terms, duration, everything. It creates my own vault of documents. I added an AI chat where I can ask things like “draft an invoice for unbilled time on Project X” or “what’s the total amount invoiced to Client Y this year?”

That’s the micro-app argument in practice. A tool shaped entirely around one person’s workflow, built in under two days. Jonny Burch stated that the source of truth for design is moving from Figma to code. Sten is further along that path—a designer who stopped hiring developers entirely.

Sten on the broader shift in thinking:

For decades, the default response to any problem was “what software should I subscribe to?” We browsed Product Hunt. We compared pricing pages. We squeezed our workflows into someone else’s idea of how things should work.

The point isn’t the tool. The point is the muscle. Once you’ve built one thing, you start seeing opportunities everywhere. You stop asking “is there an app for that?” and start asking “what if I just made it?”