So I downloaded my data, and had Claude vibecode a fully-featured clone in a single evening. Even if I was paying Anthropic API rates, it cost me less than a single year of my Solo plan.

I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.

Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.

Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

When BendingSpoon or IAC acquired an asset, it's meant to be held by them in order to augment their existing portfolio.

M&A isn't the hallmark of PE - restructuring an asset in order to exit out of it at a profit is.

The classic PE monetization strategy is to acquire an underperforming asset, restructure said asset, and then exit the asset at around 20% IRR.

BendingSpoons on the other hand is a holding company that is acquiring and consolidating stagnant but large SaaS platforms into a single mega-platform.

The economics are different as are the operational and organizational structures.

Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.

The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people.

So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique.

So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.