Software vendors should be providing the platform, including any hard-to-build widgets, and "stock" look-and-feel so that the software is usable out of the box, but then the customers should be able to send their product feature requests directly to a chatbot, whether it is embedded into the platform (i.e. same vendor) or rides on top (i.e. different vendor).
This is the new form of UGC. The vendor can turn it into a marketplace within that platform, promote popular 3rd party features in that marketplace, etc.
Pro $49/month
- Includes $49 of usage a month
- ≈ a few hundred active end-user sessions
"You are Vendo Auto, a safety judge for tool calls.",
"Choose run only when the call is appropriate for the user and context.",
"Choose ask when user confirmation is warranted, and block when the call must not proceed.",
"Return a concise rationale grounded in the supplied call, context, directions, and recent activity.",
I would also encourage you to take a look at our benchmarks (linked in the post), that show how the gaurdrails we have in-place allow us to deliver pretty strong results to our users. And as a last point, most of our users are not creating business-critical features with Vendo right now. For a lot of them, it is an additional feature that they wished they had but didn't. And for the companies we work with, the benefit of providing their customers with this level of customization outweigths the possible risk that you mention.
Would love to hear more of your thoughts, thanks for the feedback!
Frankly I don’t think this is that relevant. When software breaks, most people don’t want to get support from another piece of software. They want human support. As the models get better, I’d wager the problems that fall through will get increasingly messy by nature of a) being hard enough to stump the model or b) the model running in circles making changes that obscure or worsen the problem. Especially if you have non-technical users who can’t accurately describe what they want or the problem with the current state.
Benchmarks and guardrails are nice and all, but as you said problems will never be 100% self correctable. Models are good enough until they aren’t. I like to take a “what’s the worst that could happen” approach to planning support. Murphy’s law and all that.
> And as a last point, most of our users are not creating business-critical features with Vendo right now.
Just give it some time… you’d be surprised what becomes business critical in the eyes of a customer. Sooner or later a report will become part of an accounting workflow etc, and it’ll break on the wrong day and suddenly payroll is late. You know how many Excel sheets are “business critical”? Same thing.
An alternative model you might consider is selling direct to the end user companies and taking a partnership approach to the apps you work with. End users come straight to you for help, you have a list of integrated apps you already support with the required plan/license from that vendor plus custom MCP support and features that don’t need an API, then sell professional services engagements if an end user client wants you to work with one of their vendors to set up a new integrated app. That way you reduce support friction, and your end users are aligned with your buyers.
I often find my users want to throw their Claude at it and have everything handled. Users have even developed their own local UIs using Claude Design. As long as they are within the bounds of the MCP I already provide access to, no problem. This also has the added benefit of using the AI subscription the org already pays for (or using the customers).
Edit: Congrats on the launch and thanks for open sourcing!
I think you bring up a good point though on how consumption of software will evolve (and the possibility of Claude just being the entrance to everything), and I think this is soemthing we have been thinking a lot about as well.
As a data point, our users are going a step further. We gave away our desktop software as OSS and our users fork and vibe code on top with the entire stack. They get the benefit of not having JavaScript powering a media heavy app since we wrote it in Rust. Now we have users making their own tutorials about it.
I think non experts will appreciate engineers solving for smoothness, distributed systems, and all the hard parts that can back them into corners. They want to fill in the UX / workflow pieces themselves.
I think these "hard part" pillars will endure for a while longer.
But you're going to have to give away more than you've ever given away before. Treat your users as junior engineers on your team. That's the new normal.
And for full disclosure, none of our users have software backgrounds whatsoever. They're just heavy into Claude Code as complete software newbies. It's really awesome to watch them building really neat workflows.