F2F #83: F%&$ you code

I've been thinking about a concept I want to call "fuck you code" because right now, more or less everyone is familiarised with the term "fuck you money" and because why not.

In short, "fuck you money" is the amount where you could tell your boss to go fuck himself and walk out tomorrow. "Fuck you code" is the same thing, but for software subscriptions.

I hope I will be able to convey the idea correctly. Bear with me.

By my definition, "fuck you money" is the price point at which your ability to build something yourself makes paying for it feel like a genuine choice, not a necessity. And that changes everything about how you evaluate tools for work and for personal use, even.

To exemplify this, TextExpander costs a few dollars per month. I use it, I pay for it, I love it... zero guilt. If it were $100/month, I'd have it replaced with a custom script, now that I can code more, better and faster. It's one of my favourite tools, so it has also a sentimental value, plus I know one of the founders, who I know will read this because he's subscribed to this newsletter, so hi Greg 👋

I know TextExpander isn't a simple tool, but I use only a subset of everything that offers, and this subset could be easily (?) replaceable. I just chose not to do it.

Fuck you code is a threshold. Where is that threshold exactly? Depends. There's something more beyond the pricing variable.

Another example: Superhuman is 30 dollars per month. Increasingly hard to justify now that other clients have caught up with their standards, but they still are the best at email. However, since they got acquired, I feel less emotionally attached and I feel like I'm paying for only a feature. Again: I use about 50% of what it offers, but only 10% of the features are actual painkillers for me vs "nice-to-haves".

However, there's another problem with Superhuman, which brings me to my second consideration about Fuck You Code: it's very expensive, but I won't replace it because it's too complex.

The interesting part about fuck you code is that it's not just about price. Complexity matters too: specifically, how long until you have something working. Or, more bluntly: do you want to learn about how to handle email? I don't. I can write to replace a lot of lesser-complexity software that are mostly glorified CRUDs, like a CRM, a to-do list app, a dashboard, etc, but not an email client or something that requires deep algorithmic knowledge or fine tuning of specific codebases & models.

• low complexity, low price (TextExpander)
  • You buy it for a feature and you get the whole product - even if you don't need it.
  • Usually you don't even think about this subscription when you're charged for it.
  • A good signal to identify them is that you forget to cancel them even if you don't use them.
  • Switching cost is near zero.
  • ❌ Not worth replacing this category.
• low complexity, high price (Typeform)
  • Its business model is deeply rooted in being the best at X or the only one that does X, which was legit in 2015, but not any longer.
  • Traditionally, they've been good products with top-tier marketing: Calendly, Loom, Typeform, etc.
  • Also, they used to signal status: if you were paying for a web form, it's because you cared about the UX deeply. Do you have a booking tool? You have to be so busy.
  • ✅ Ideal fit for fuck you code.
• high complexity, high price (Superhuman)
  • They have a bigger moat: regulation, private algorithms, they operate on another domain (network, hardware, IoT, etc).
  • ❌ Too complex to bother.
  • BUT you can build parts of it if you're just interested in a subset of the features and it makes business sense in terms of savings per year. Partial fuck you code, if you want to.
• high complexity, low price (Linear, Figma pre-acquisition)
  • Mostly subsidised by VC money to win market share, but price eventually goes up.
  • Generous free tiers, like Notion or some email newsletter services.
  • Very generous integrations ecosystems that entrench you deeper into their usage and dependency. Once everything is connected, it's hard to get out.
  • Genuinely complex to build (real-time sync, keyboard-driven UI, graph-based issue relationships...).
  • ❌ Doesn't usually make sense by any stretch of the imagination.

Caveat: The partial fuck you code - For personal use it'll be different than for business. In the personal domain, you might go for low complexity, high price only but in the context of a business like MarsBased, we have more people and resources, so we can also tackle the high complexity, high price because we can tailor a piece of software down to our own needs, writing a leaner version of that software, only with what we need, that helps us save tens of thousands of dollars per year. I can see this happening in the short- to mid-term.

This is actually where agents change the game most dramatically. You're not going to rebuild Superhuman, but you could spend an afternoon having an agent wire up the three keyboard shortcuts and the send-later logic that account for 80% of why you're paying for it. You don't need the whole product you need your slice of it. That's partial fuck you code, and it's often the most honest application of the concept.

With AI agents doing most of the actual coding now, that timeline has collapsed DRASTICALLY for a lot of tools. Which means a lot of subscriptions I used to accept without thinking are now sitting uncomfortably above my threshold and might be cancelled soon. My Claude Code is hungry to devour more tools and subscriptions.

And the threshold is personal: it shifts with your skill level, your mental bandwidth budget, how good you are at breaking down a problem. Two people looking at the same $20/month tool might reach completely opposite conclusions.

There's also a ceiling. Fuck you code only applies to things within your actual build horizon. I'm not rebuilding Figma or Linear at any price but some of the apps/services I could pay for but they're not entirely fitting what I want? maybe.

The concept is really about optionality: Fuck you money gives you freedom from needing a salary, while fuck you code gives you freedom from needing to pay for software.

And it feels damn good to feel like a developer again.