The paid program can do it because it can accept these files as an input, and then you can use the general toolset to work towards the same goal. But the program is clunky an convoluted as hell.
To give an example, imagine you had tens of thousands of pictures of people posing, and you needed to change everyone's eye color based on the shirt color they were wearing.
You can do this in Photoshop, but it's a tedious process and you don't need all $250/mo of Photoshop to do it.
Instead make a program that auto grabs the shirt color, auto zooms in on the pupils, shows a side window of where the object detection is registering, and tees up the human worker to quickly shade in the pupils.
Dramatically faster, dramatically cheaper, tuned exactly for the specific task you need to do.
That's a task that I could automate as a developer, but other than LLM "vibe coding", I don't know that there's a good way for a lay person to automate it.
1. Simple CRUD apps
2. Long-tail / low-TAM apps
Consequently, you got "bundled" generalized apps that sort of did what you wanted (GP's example) or fly-by-night one-off solutions that haven't been updated in decades.
The more interesting questions are (a) who is going to develop these new solutions and (b) who is going to maintain these new solutions? In-house dev/SRE or newly more-efficient (even cheaper) outsourced? I'd bet on in-housing, as requirements discovery / business problem debugging is going to quickly dominate delivery/update time. It already did and that was before we boosted simple app productivity.
I wouldn't.
Knowing what to build is part that many businesses struggle with.
As much as consultants are lambasted, my experience of companies is that they struggle to develop or maintain anything in-house - even where it should theoretically make economic sense. >>46864857
I imagine "vibe coder" will eventually coalesce with business requirements analyst, into a sort of "LOB developer-lite." I.e. every low-code products' undelivered citizen developer dream.
You need someone in the technical details and with some developer background (thinking through edge cases is a hard skill requirement), and you need someone with the process analysis and documentation skills (as well as the ability to push back / simplify requirements where it makes sense).
External developers/consultants are typically terrible at the requirements discovery and specification stage, because they're not embedded day-to-day with the business. Ergo, you get stupid feature decisions because someone left a sentence off a doc.
From your other comment, I think you're thinking about more complex / core / feature-rich solutions than I am. I agree those may remain SaaS / outsourced.
But there's no way in hell dirt-simple CRUD and "I am the only person in the world who has this need" solutions stay out of house.